Gili Haimovich
No grass will cradle you,
no green allure you,
an angry pumping vein
of a muted tree.
Unable to stand the underground,
you attempt to stand up, rise yourself above it,
squashed out
between the pavement and the wire fence.
What a relief, at least it’s not a peek-a-boo wooden fence.
How offensive would that be,
a fence made of your own species,
overlooking the freedom of children running in the park.
No, you don’t fall for the sweetness
nor for the one bird’s tweets offers.
You can’t.
You’re just there,
a witness of neglect
of how reaching out, for soil
will awaken up, your senses
to no more than roughness.
Gili Haimovich is an Israeli – Canadian poet and translator published internationally. She has published the chapbook Living on a Blank Page (Blue Angel Press, 2008) and six volumes of poetry in Hebrew. She has been nominated as an outstanding artist in Israel (2015), and won couple of international prizes in Hong Kong by Proverse Publishers (2016) and in Italy by the Europa in Versi Poetry Festival (2017). Her work appears in journals and anthologies such as World Literature Today, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, Poem – International English Language Quarterly, LRC – Literary Review of Canada, Asymptote, Recours au Poème (with translations to French), Blue Lyra, Bakery, TOK1: Writing the New Toronto, Deep Water, Circumference, High Window, Poetry Repairs, and main Israeli literary journals. Her poems are translated to several languages. Gili works as a writing-focused arts therapist and educator.