My Heart is in the East, but I am in the West

After Judah Ha-Levi

Summer

Here, all is cool gurgling marble fountain set in tiled floor. In the garden flowering trees exhale a dusky glut of cloves and musk. I long to breathe the bracing scent of hyssop rising each morning from Jerusalem’s dry hills.

A boy comes in with apricots cooled in mountain snow; My thirst does not abate. I long to drink from Zion’s sparse wells, to rid my mouth of this assassin’s taste.

Winter

Lamps gutter, then burn bright as wind stirs velvet hangings. The wine-server poses and pouts, unnoticed, musician’s hand falters and is silent.

Chill wind from the Atlantic’s void laps at this Spanish shore. We hardly hear his mongrel howl; each on our couch, swathed in longing, thin with love.

In His Holy Land, the righteous wind, hamseem blows from the stern and dry-eyed desert. Each drop of sand would water my wounded heart, its chambers putting forth the reddest scent.

Emerald winks, pearls weep on my cuff. Oh, for a simple sheepskin on my back, to face cold gusts from Sidon’s ancient hills: the teeth-aching snap of ha-laila b’aretz, a night in the valley of my forefathers’ bones.