Songs from the Diaspora: Matot-Masei
Songs From The Diaspora is a weekly poetry featuring poetry based on the Torah portion, and sometimes about how that intersects with life in the Diaspora. Feel free to comment and share.
Matot-Masei
A Holy map emerges
In the bridge of text
We wish them forward
But feet do plant,
earth at their heels
What soil calls them so
from across this Jordan?
whose sweet water is a vow spoken
and heard aloud-
among the hard flock and dusty hooves
lapping its shoals at dusk
The lines of our palms
lead back only to bamidbar
Where we were born
A chart of the sky
In the hollows of our faces
Searing out, a constellation,
a nation bounded on all sides, formed in letter
and on our feet and palms
the dust of bamidbar,
Spiky plants,
the hardness of war
And even,
Accident,
Even this,
makes its way across the Jordan with us
Aface this-
a cool veil of salve, a small safety-
a city of refuge, not six but one
a daughter on her father’s land
when all might have been lost.
