Woman of Valor
Absolute bravery is the blood from the womb, red gemstone
beating in the heart of her spouse. She soldiers on.
Corseted in the fabric of the day, a woman weaves with chapped hands.
Dark is the sound of a ship’s horn when it wakes her sleeping children.
Even the maid gets a day off,
fields holler to be planted, wine stains burst onto the tablecloths,
good wives soothe when the spindle pricks.
Healing a broken world demands the thick arms of a laborer.
Inside this new decade, our hair-splitting 2020’s, the
Jewish mother is still a trope of devotion and smother, a blanket of scarlet wool
in the heat,
kisses shaded by ash trees.
Land of elders, we are losing our way in the narrow lanes of the internet highway.
Men, alongside their women, and those in-between,
need
only
pass dysfunction from gate to gate, content evergreen.
Quintessentially, mothers peddle in promise, belting out lies until we believe that
rationing our joy is the only way to live.
Smiling, a woman waits for the last day, when,
tripping over her own guilt, she can set aside the mirror and comb.
Until a woman holds herself dear, she cannot be idle.
Valor may be just another word for persistence,
willing god to be kind to our children. Se-
x is the lowest form of flattery,
yielding a second of shudder, praised babies, an iron will. Let a mother’s
zenith be her sanity, her self.
~
Revisionism
walking this winter requires bravery
not because of the ice
there’s so
little frozen anyway
February’s warm as April
who slushes and knots up the path
past the elementary school climbing web
young grass bleeding into a patchy high school lawn
past Rwanda Bean where raw coffee comes
sourced from a nation in terminal recovery
past the attorney’s office where they dare to hang two flags
one routinely defaced in the fashion of the now
(suds and elderly elbow grease wipe the incorrigible scribbles)
baxter woods prepares a forest bath
movie-heaven light-beams between the branches
clean squeak of leaves
wet gravel to wipe from between the dog’s toes
past telephone poles riddled with silver from someone’s staple gun
a hundred years of flyers
and this evening when the sun is heading down later than it has been
I read the faded kaffiyeh and torment round a woman’s xeroxed face
I know I know I know I am grieving and jewing
the poster is affixed but one edge flaps
crooked
the paper itself
I swear it
in my dreams and black Sharpie I can make out a shaky
from Hamas
above a carat after
free and palestine
~
Missing Itzhak Perlman
Ever the pleaser,
when mom’s eardrum ruptured
I accompanied her to the doctor. Swimmer’s ear, pool water lodged
behind the stirrup, the pain an anvil to the side of her head.
Dad and the boys woke long before dawn to climb, the
only hike worth its salt, my brothers still lithe and nimble
then. Did we laugh more often? I lost Herod’s palace, rock
terraces, the sandals and arrowheads, because I was six years old and
my mother was a mosaic. I did not hike, bathe in the dust
from the siege, or stomp upon the suicide site.
The cable car, brand-new that tourist season in 1979, afforded a view
even for the disabled. We called them crippled, then, blithely.
And I missed the chance to ride up Masada with a virtuoso,
a childhood idol, wheelchair flattened
against the wall so the doors would shut.
My father was a fortress, tonally challenged,
but he recognized that curly hair. It was the violinist’s first
time up the mountain, and I was waiting in the doctor’s office
for my mother to hear.
______
Alisha Goldblatt is an English teacher and writer living in Portland, Maine with her two wonderful children and one lovely husband. She has published poems in the Comstock Review, River Heron Review, The Café Review, and many others, and essays in Stonecoast Review and MothersAlwaysWrite, among others. Alisha writes whenever she can and gets published when she’s lucky.