Leaving Israel

-Maya Bernstein

Leaving Israel

again.

How often can a love be reawakened and abandoned?

My wounds leak words, the carnage of an aching heart, ink memories of the scents of orange blossoms, hills that caress my legs like a lover’s hand, warm, firm, the clear gentle undulating waters of the Kinneret surrounded by lazy lavender beckoning mountains, and the sparkling sun. It always surprises me, leaves me breathless, this yearning dormant love of land. It is as unexpected as bumping into an old love, a love you have convinced yourself that you had overcome, somehow moved beyond, mastered. A love that at first you do not recognize, surrounded as you are by the cunning work of time, whose bending sickle’s compass has fooled or ravaged or dulled or hypnotized you, you more than anyone or anything else. But though the love has altered it has not bent, and it is awakened like spring in the fields of the Gallil, red anemones bursting from the sweet earth through your layers of resistance, of satisfied self, and you find yourself swooning and dizzy in jasmine air, quickly wiping a tear from your cheek with the back of your hand, suddenly exposed. Exposed and singing, “Oh, my Kinneret,” and “Anemones, anemones,” songs your parents sang to you in your cradle, songs of a love passed from generation to generation, songs that haunt your dreams as you fly away, over the Mediterranean Sea and the Alps and the towns and cities of the old world and the Atlantic and the towns and cities of the new world back to your world, where at night you toss and turn with lover’s lag, broken shards of songs piercing your rest – “and perhaps, none of this ever took place, and perhaps, it was only a dream” – a dream in which you gathered your lover’s red anemones lovingly placing them in a basket to take far away, to dry and flatten and conceal in books of poetry, congealing letters and crumbling petals trying to fill the gaping spaces of desire.

Maya Bernstein writes about modern motherhood for Lilith Magazin'e blog http://www.lilith.org/blog/, and about Jewish innovation for UpStart Bay Area http://www.upstartbayarea.org/, where she works as Director of Education. She often commutes by train, a venue on which her poetry habit cannot be contained.