Gili Haimovich [Israel]

 

To Be a Giraffe
 
1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates, 
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.
 
“What is your favorite animal of them all?”
I asked Francis, our tour guide in the Masai Mara safari.
He came with rifle and khaki uniform,
as if camouflaged as a solider.
“The giraffes,” he answered instinctively.
“They hurt no one,”
said the man who has known them from before I was born. 
 
2.
As I'm about to turn fifty, half a century, I’m awakened
by the October 7^th massacre in Israel,
by the unrestful sleep since it happened
and a war that follows. 
It’s the giraffes that come
to visit in my dream.
I see two of them,
perhaps a mother and daughter,
in my building's backyard,
tall enough to peek into my window
too tall to be protected from the rockets
in the zoo near us,
an open space one,
called Safari.
Too tall to be hidden
in a bomb shelter, with us,
the neighbors brought them here
to lean against our small building
to be sheltered from the bombings. 
 
The day after I pack my daughters,
we buy books at the airport,
and leave for Greece.
We are based next to the Acropolis
perhaps its outcrop and all it stands for
so many decades
will protect us.

Flawed Gift
 
Everything we noticed gave back its gift of expanding to other dimensions:
the green echo of the trees reflected on the Formica closet,
the golden browns immerse the girls' curls with deeper hues,
the gray net of fingerprints spread around the white light switch,
the night –
we gained seeing in them a world concealed within our own separated world
in which we take no part.  
 
 
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. 

 

Author’s Bionote:
 
*Gili Haimovich is an Israeli award-winning poet, translator, editor, and photographer who writes bilingually. She is the author of 12 poetry collections, including “Promised Lands” published in the US, the Hebrew volume “Nisuem Bepreda” (“Trails in Separations”) and the multilingual volume Note. She has received prizes and honors for Best Foreign Poet at Italy’s “I Colori dell’Anima” and “Colori dell’Anima” competition, an Excellence Grant from the Israeli Ministry of Culture, fellowship residency at the International Writers’ Workshop in Hong Kong and more. Her work has been translated into 35 languages including full length books in French, Serbian, Albanian and Estonian and her poetry is featured numerous publications worldwide such as “World Literature Today”, “The Best Asian Poetry”, and “101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium”.