Your Reflection in My Mirror

Your Reflection in My Mirror Your Reflection in My Mirror Schulamith Chava Halevy As toward a stranger I was destined to wed Tentatively I approached Hope and trepidation. I prayed that as in ancient legends Perhaps we knew each other in a different life. For long parted souls look not into the future, But the past. Our eyes met and immediately we knew How could we forget! Six hundred years ago we basked together In the Spanish golden sun. We sang the same romances, shared our wine. In the splendor of Granada How peacefully we sailed upon the dream Of harmony and cultures shared, Of human paradise. Then the storm hit. Stunned and confused we ran And as we fled Our hands tore apart And torrential waves Ofpeople and events Swept over us. We lost one another Five hundred years ago. We took another step, My feet still unsure, The sands so soft and wet still From the ebbing tide 109 110 SHOFAR Fa111999 Vol. 18, No.1 How dare I look? I could not know what's left to recognize In the wreckage And how to make the leap Across half a millennium. But even as our frames held on to solid ground We could hear the flutter of our souls, Never minding time or place They embraced in a flight of fantasy. Soaring high above the anger and the fears And all the distances and walls That five hundred years apart have built We whirled by new landscapes Of lives we might have lived, People whom we might have been. We wept by one another's sorrows Gathered flowers in one another's childhood fields. When it came time for me to go, I discovered that you Had polished my spirit into A brilliant gem And from each of its myriad facets You shine To the farthest reaches of my Ancestral memory. When it came time for me to go, I did not know yet to thank you enough For the many new lives, All the joy and the pain Your courageous voyage gave me To hold me till we meet again. Nineteen ninety-three Five hundred and one years. Where are you now? What new stations did you cross Your Reflection in My Mirror In your lonely pilgrimage? And did you mend your heart - I recall the ripping sound, when it overfilled Above the graveyard Did it heal soft and large, with room enough for me That I may always walk with you (I could not hear your answer when I called). Five hundred years and one, how is your strength Do you walk always with your soul And do you travel in your conscious hours or your sleep? For stay, we know, our spirits will no more. Five hundred and one years. Do you still look for my reflection in your mirror? 111 ...