midrashic poetry - Elana Klugman

How They Left

with dough draped
over their shoulders

no time to let it rise
thousands of women

It has been
a fiery summer,
too hot to sustain
the newly planted May apple.

A man walks a field straightened
by young potato greens. A vagrant
wind raises dust. My windows
are closed. How does
he still walk with burning eyes?

I have grown up
even though
that same young woman
still sometimes
takes the steering wheel

The morning after
I wonder
was I fully present
did I receive as the earth does,
in gullies and fields filling
my empty thirsty places.

I am still the skin and bones
of old constricting stories
living in the wilderness.

We too are tasked
as was the tribe of Levi,
with dismantling the mishkan, our sanctuary
for the sake of protection, of restoration,

as with Jacob
who became Yisrael
that is to say all of us,
falling back sometimes
into his old name

I was named
for the dream of peace

May this poem
in praise of emptiness
restore a drop of radiant silence
glean the broken letters