In this no-man’s land
the place between, narrow and deep
bleached bones rise from desert waves.
No amount of grain can make me whole.
no flour, no Torah
The wound opened before I was even born.
Wounds in womb and cistern
gashes on an altar, seizing and grasping at heels,
voices in shadow and darkness
I call my children Oblivion and Flourishing -
I, who was left for dead-
have remembered to forget and
forgotten to remember
blotted out and erased my own name
from under the watchful eye of the Sun.
In the end
we all seek to fill the emptiness, this void
the hunger
consuming like gaunt cattle
any morsel of love thrown our way.
Rabbi Lindsey Healey-Pollack 