The Sky from the Classroom Window on 18 Margolin St.

I wrote this poem from my classroom in Rehovot, where planes pass overhead throughout the day. Growing up near Tel Nof Air Base, the sound is familiar, interrupting lessons and thoughts. This poem is about what it feels like to live under that sky and to keep looking up.

How many planes pass every day
by the classroom window
on 18 Margolin Street?

Did the colonel whose street was named for
know how many planes would fly above it?
Did he ever fly one?
Did he ever look down
The way I look up?

Did his plane, like the ones crossing the window now,
go to Gaza and beyond,
to stop terrorists,
Over lives that were not statistics yet?

The people the terrorists threaten
sit in a classroom
by the window on 18 Margolin Street,
protected by the planes.

The sound breaks the lesson—
desks, notebooks, half-written sentences.
Someone looks up.
Someone stops listening.

Not fear.
Not panic.

Just an interruption,
and the quiet knowledge
of why the sky here
never stays empty.