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My Hair
I could get a wig, and look like Orthodox Jewish women who think they are so glamorous wearing someone else's hair. If God really wanted women to cover their heads, so men wouldn't lose control he'd command them to tuck their wayward strands under a simple kerchief, not beneath an expensive sheitel to make you look like Farrah Fawcett. I thought the whole idea was modesty. I know I still have good legs, but at eighty with or without hair, not many men, except for your father, would get excited seeing me creeping down the street. [End Page 77] Bald from chemo, I would gain a few months, perhaps a year. I prefer to die with hair.
Willa Schneberg received the 2002 Oregon Book Award In Poetry for In The Margins of The World, Plain View Press. Her next collection of poetry "Storytelling in Cambodia" is forthcoming from Calyx Books, Spring '06. She judged the 15th Annual Reuben Rose Poetry Competition sponsored by Voices Israel, and, went to Israel in December 2004, to participate in the Awards Ceremony. She is the originator and coordinator of the Oregon Jewish Writers Series at the Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland, where her clay sculpture of Judaica has been exhibited. She is a congregant of P'nai Or in Portland and a member of Brit Tzedek V'Shalom.
