These three poems by Gili Haimovich attempt to traverse the dark, mysterious distances between the self and the ways it can be gathered from the mundane details of everyday life around it…
by: Gili Haimovich
Night
To Maya Attoun
Can’t evade it, have to extract gems from the night in order to survive.
Will you still recognize me when I cease battling?
I put the kettle on morning after morning with yogic devotion
and yet the world’s lips remain sealed.
No one lets me under their vines,
into the hearts on which I keep knocking
when my pride is lost
and the bareness of my loneliness
strips me away from any kingdoms
even the ones you can buy with words.
Maya is dead.
No more options to find answers.
The night embraces no longer.
She’s been dead for over two weeks now
and I haven’t become a better poet
I just love my husband and kids more and more
which means I’m clinging
before they dissolve.
Plain,
not by choice
but in the same manner as those who’ve been forsaken,
without the luxury of being dishonest.
How is it possible to jest with even one word?
Maya is dead.
And for a year I haven’t been sleeping, really.
It’s the wrong me, the fastened, dimmed one,
a litmus paper for all I fell short of reaching.
Didn’t reach for any stars or applause,
the night is too short.
I assemble this pier here
to rest on a foot
or a reading eye
for whom their strength to be rescued tonight
has run out.
Hand
Those who dangle air
dance on its edges
lure in distances,
comfort the horizons
in their forced return to the lap.
Wing-like oars patched to a mothership,
never to anchor elsewhere,
crude stiches to a him.
Exchange
And I wanted to explain I have more proximity to aging.
But not at the risk of losing any shreds of my appeal.
And I had hoped the suited man in the row in front of us
once had someone, preferably a lover,
who told him his eyelashes are beautiful.
And this is how I kept my thoughts untamed
when all was dimmed by the grayness of academia.
And we exchanged whispers (they made it all worthwhile).
Your vowels slipped down my spine.
And I exchanged lust with this poem
to keep you near.
Gili Haimovich is a prizewinning poet, translator, editor who writes bilingually in English and Hebrew. She is the author of 12 poetry books, including Promised Lands, (Finishing Line, US) and the multilingual book Note (El nido del fénix, Mexico). Her work has won awards in Italy, Hong Kong, Israel and India, and has been translated into 35 languages with full-length books published in French, Albanian, Serbian and Estonian. Her poetry is published extensively worldwide in journals and anthologies such as World Literature Today, The Washington Square Review, Columbia Journal, The Best Asian Poetry Anthology, A World Anthology of Border Poetry, Asymptote and The Literary Review of Canada.
