Our Reality

I was on the bus this afternoon, coming back from Giva’at Shmuel when the high pitch rang out across Tel Aviv. For the first few moments you don’t realize what’s happening. You look up and look over shoulder to the other passengers on the bus with their same confused faces, and then it hits. An azaka, siren, has gone off. But you’re on the bus, so the driver pulls over, and you get off and get as far from the bus as you can. You turn around, cover your heads and whisper a silent prayer “please don’t hit my bus”.

This is the reality we live in right now. In Israel. Rockets fall from the sky, and the iron dome strikes back. And civilians stay alive, regardless of their head coverings. And it happens multiple times a week, sometime multiple times a day. Up the coast babies are awoken from their sleeps as parents frantically grab them and run into the safe room or stairwell. And the iron dome does its job. If it wasn’t for the iron dome, our realities wouldn’t be going out for a birthday celebration on a Monday night.

Some cities have been spared the azaka, being in an inconvenient geographical location for rockets to hit. But you can hear the booms bounce off the valley all the way from the coast into Modiin. This last Friday night, as I sat outside after dinner, a barrage headed up along the coast to Tel Aviv and the Dan area. A chorus of howls from every dog in the city erupted as the iron dome crashed into the rockets. So I wrote the following poem:

The chorus of howls that sing towards 

The clap of cymbals

As a battle in the sky wages 

In distant cities- along the coast

The chorus of howls that sing towards 

Thundering skies 

As we raise our stone’s against theirs 

From a land at our shores 

The howls at the shooting stars across the distant skies

Stirs in me something deep

A yearning for howls at the moon, and only the moon