Rachel Berghash
By Rachel Berghash
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Rockets Falling’
and the melon field drinks the cup of wrath. I go from room to room, weighing my conscience, and stop by the window to look at the view. The river is calm, a boat or two. Melons, unpicked, are on fire, leaving black scars. A kid’s kite on a winged wind disappearing in smoke.
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Untitled, Jerusalem, 2002’
You are captives of illusion, experts in eluding truth, you party, drink wine, pick anemone in spring. Occasionally you are reminded that life is transient as grass, that death lies in ambush among green meadows. Though the wrath of the suicide bomber is daily at your door, your children bask in your warmth, and this…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Gaza’
Scrawny goats limp on heaps of rubble, the sea — under weights of sorrow. Nowhere to go, she says, escaping the bombs with her wounded child. And the child guarded by ten silent angels who weep.
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Soldiers, Israel, 2014’
For Dina Dewy petals on his uniform, a psalm inscribed beneath roots of an anemone. “Every soldier is a flower” you say, grown with a morning shower of affection, pulsing gently, petals quiver at the thought of killing.
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘The Great Dying’
He gathered his friend’s dead flesh, walked back and sat in a field reciting a psalm. Kneeling, he signaled the signs of courage and defeat with his bloody fingers, each sign for each heart beat before the great dying. An instinctive act, he ruminates. He sounds the psalm like a warning bell, befuddled by what…
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The Schmooze POEM: ‘Neighbors’
If only I’d climb over the fence and step into my neighbor’s grove of almonds, stealthily put my ear against his window listening closely to Farid and his oud, and think of his ancestors as mine, and remember him coming from Mecca with his green flag for my son’s birth, if only we’d sit together…
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