WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  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 unrest...

  The Barbarians (Round Two)   It was not in vain that we awaited the barbarians, it was not in vain that we gathered in the city square. It was not in vain that our great ones put on their official robes and rehearsed their speeches for the event. It was not in vain that we smashed our temples and erected new ones to their gods; as proper we burnt our books that have nothing in them for people like that. As the prophesy foretold the barbarians came, and took the keys to the city from the king’s hand. But when they came they wore the garments of the land, and their customs were the customs of the state; and when they commanded us in our own tongue we no longer knew when the barbarians had come to us.   (Translated by Vivian Eden)       Orpheus Prayer   Death and yet more death, sand and more sand We have stood in the square hungry to be   and, like mountain shadows, covered the city with pictures of a waking sleep.   Was she there or wa...