Two Poems from the Galilee, by Rachel Tzvia Back

In the Beginning the Word

1

the word was
 unverbed unruled just birthed
before bird on the altar or binding
 at hilltop not taken or given in
swindling faith not proof of god whose
 token or law was spoken
to frighten the soul oh black hole
 where once my heart beat

In the beginning the word was
 unlettered unfettered soft
syllables uttered as wind in an intimate
 stroke across a desert slope hope
is the unfallen grandly silhouetted at
 ridgetop light of the beginning
world resting in the night valley undimmed
 by greed and lies —

In the beginning what was solitary
 in the land escaped belongingly
no one’s a word imagined as spoken to self
 from the deep breath or breathe
urgently urged to the newborn who
 won’t cry her ear is too soft for this
babel she hears only sweet promised stream
 through the dry wadi —

But as though in the beginning was we
 knew the end with last sun
setting so darkness could speak its piece don’t
 imagine peace no starshine or moonrise
to impede just a world filled to its brim with
 despair debris through all the city
streets demolished above tunnels beneath bodies
 everywhere and the only word was —
 leave —

2

oh black hole
 where once my heartbeat was
hope
is the unfallen grandly silhouetted at
 ridgetop
breath or breathe sweet promised
 stream through the dry wadi but we
don’t imagine peace just
 despair debris demolished
leave oh black hole
where
once
was

in the beginning

After

The great dead teach the living not to hate.
—Brenda Hillman

The great dead returned.
The many dead.
The beautiful boys, all
the beautiful girls.

The desperate mothers, the
stunned fathers, the still
wide-eyed babies, the sweet
toddlers. The bodied

dead and those burnt to ash,
they too returned. The dead
we counted and the dead we couldn’t
count, we stopped counting as

the numbers rose too high.
The dead whose deaths broke
our breath into ragged tears
and the dead whose deaths left us

unmoved. The dead whose names
we knew, whose names we
spoke in our sleep, in our terror
dreams, and the dead whose names

we never knew and now can’t
care to know. The unburied
dead, rotting under the rubble, and
the dead buried in mass graves,

wrapped in plastic, in white sheets.
The dead borne by the weeping
crowd, carried on stretchers,
draped in defiant flags, placed

in yet one more disbelieving
grave. And the grandmothers
dead who had planned to die
in their beds, the old men dead,

those who had fled once
or twice before, then
planted trees to be themselves
rooted, olive and almond they

faithfully tended, till that morning,
that day, that night, that week, those
months they became one of the dead,
the great dead, the many

dead who now return,
demanding that we stop
speaking in their names,
that we stop making

more dead in their bleeding,
their aching and orphaned
names.