Those aren’t wrinkles, merely places where
the skin is burrowing to lick her own
dark sweetness. Since her body’s fashioned from
the clay remaining after Adam’s spine and hair,
she often yields the fibers of her trees
for baskets, shoes, the rope and needles, thread
her mythic children crafted in their need.
In her youth she tarried near the Euphrates;
Chaldean men en route through Babylon,
Assyrians, caressed and carried her
from one oasis to the next. A year
is worth a date palm, and a month, a frond
according to the hieroglyphs that suckle
on her absence, spurting syllables.
Previously published in “Immigrant” (Black Lawrence Press, 2010)
Marcela Sulak has translated three collections of poetry from Hapsburg Bohemia and the Congo and is co-editing “Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Forms” (Rose Metal Press). She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.