"Yehuda Amichai/Emily Brontë" and "Barely"
Yeduda Amichai/Emily Bronte
with whispering gasps both knew passionate power lust and optimistic love appearing before them in the language of ghosts accused of being tour guides of loss mastering the imagination which was inspired by little toy soldiers who helped amichai with his imagery forcing him to fall with honor into a farmers field on a farm that looked like the moors that emily and her sisters loved while sitting in a fictional room reading fictional island stories full of characters brutal german crosses showing spheres of the strong tainted souls of sadness and loftier fledging rabbits hopping on lacerated flesh forgiving duty and preserving the complex and motivated sacrilegious amichai and the inspiration on emily rivals full of rejection hearts overcome with stress the spirits float with impressed genius with socialism and prayers repairing mythology of the concrete desirable with clenching beating hearts for hours before the dead body rose joining emily spitting out wild pills or fish gills with slashed eyes relishing their ageless mortality of older younger pointed lips kissing kissing of the supernatural filling miscarriages of the private into bursts of cars sliding off off on off of accused writers making up fairness which wasn’t what really appeared enacted for their new love overcome by souls yearning walking on cliffs like heathcliff handsome and brooding sulking for his woman his center of the universe collapsing star of amichai screams for emily with force of ocean waves hitting rocks crashing spraying and both jump into liquid salt tasting a heavy burn on their mouths touching hands together as they float away pecked by fish and the sky is dim gray dim the old birds tweet clouds to each other on tree branches brown the moans heard in the distance tongues of loneliness the wreckage continues stains hammers amichai and emily platters the grime invisible to the music score revolving into someone else’s paper revolution
Barely
Pulled from the fire, unconscious,
skin blackened, filleted,
sliding off skin
You burnt me
Barely alive, thinking of how it was between us,
laughing at things that only we got
What happened that your flame became destructive?
Over and over flesh burned
You could never catch up with yourself, even
when hosed with water
You drowned
No, I will not throw you a life-preserver.
Gloria Mindock is the founding editor of Cervena Barva Press and one of the USA editors for Levure Litteraire (France). She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books). Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into eight languages. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award, the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center and the 5th and 40th Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman's Voice. She was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.
