Poem: The History of the Date

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.