A nerve at the top of my thigh, iced,
throbs. I sit on the ache and think
of carrots tended for thirty-five years,
what that means in the dead of winter
to be followed by a spring in which,
because I’m old and in pain,
I’ll no longer plant them:
thumbelina, chantenay, five star baby,
hundreds of tiny seeds, flat, weightless
from which sprout flimsy fronds, way too many,
their greens crowding each other, drooping,
lying limp.
I thin the beds and slowly
the ones I’ve left space for draw energy
up from the dark, their greens thicken.
That’s what I’ll miss most, that they need me –
sturdy stalks, their shoulders clamped in earth,
shoulders more intimate than those of grandnieces
and nephews, grandsons, and even
my own son and daughter
who leave me thinking of carrots
I encourage to the last harvesting,
thick orange stumps I work firmly, gently,
so careful I rarely break one.
I hate
to give up planting but my body won’t bend
to turn the soil or squat to make a seed bed.
What will I do when summer comes?
Grieving now. But what if I’d never done any of it?
What would I know of thumb and thigh
all over the watered world, city girl
who had to teach myself everything:
shift of sun’s arc in the southern sky,
clouds that will drench or pass us by,
tilth of soil sifted through my loving fingers.
© 2011 Sondra Zeidenstein
from Contraries: New and Selected Poems
Anais Nin
I stand up for her, her lies, the complex stories
she made up to cover her secret life –
she would lose the shelter of her husband’s love if he knew.
She had to live it, dozens of lovers: her clients
when she was an analyst, her husband’s colleagues,
once in the elevator on the way up to a party
where her husband was waiting, once,
on her way to the ladies room, a quickie with a stranger.
Notebooks, files to record her lies so she wouldn’t trip up.
Bigamist for years, a husband on each coast. Two sets
of married names plus the maiden name she wrote under.
Her stomach ulcerated with the intricacies.
And always keeping journals where she told the story her way.
No woman, she wrote, had ever given happiness to so many men.
Her mission, to give herself to them. As I used to feel sometimes,
sweeping my palms against each other, gesture of accomplishment
when I’d seen off a lover, having fucked him well, and held him
while he drifted, trustingly, to sleep.
Later I’d close the door behind him, lean against it, and softly,
so it would not be heard, move the slider on its chain into the groove.
Alone again. No one knows. Safe.
© 2011 Sondra Zeidenstein
from Contraries: New and Selected Poems
To Die in Jerusalem: A Documentary
Make the smallest distinction…
And heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
The Faith Mind Sutra
Two mothers in Jerusalem: one Jewish, Israeli, one Muslim, Palestinian.
The daughter of one, a suicide bomber.
The daughter of the other, victim of her bomb.
Rachel and Ayat. Both seventeen. Same dark long hair, large dark eyes,
same color skin, same height.
They didn’t know whose body parts belonged to whose body.
For four years since the bombing, Rachel’s mother seeks to meet the
mother of Ayat,
to convince her to condemn the act of her daughter, to urge “her people”
to turn against violence.
She needs her daughter to have died for something.
For four years the mothers are kept apart: impassable checkpoints, fear
of the camp’s dark streets.
Finally they meet, each in front of a camera crew.
They speak to each other’s faces on a tv screen, the covered mother and
the uncovered, each one with a speech
put together over a lifetime:
Say it, that your daughter did wrong. Say you want peace.
When I have a home, when I have my land back, when the occupation
is over.
back and forth:
When you stop, I’ll stop.
No, you stop first.
Terrorist.
Occupier.
My land.
No, my land.
The grooves of language.
Rachel was always at my side. She helped, always.
Ayat was distinguished. She loved her studies. I would have held
her back if I knew. But this is what she chose.
Even handed. No tanks, no bombs, no stones. Each side given her full voice.
This is not Israel. This is my country.
This is not your country. Just say your daughter is wrong.
Just say you’ve taken my country. Just live in a camp as I do.
Just say peace comes first.
Two pairs of dark eyes grief worn.
I listen until there is no right or wrong.
© 2011 Sondra Zeidenstein
from Contraries: New and Selected Poems
795 East Street North
Goshen, CT 06756
(860) 491-2271
(860) 491-8619 fax
sondraz@optonline.net
Designed by poetrybookdesign.com