Sketchbook  Helen Bar-Lev, IL

 

Free Verse Cyclamens and Swords Life should be sunflowers and poetry symphonies and four o’clock tea instead it’s entangled like necklaces in a drawer when you reach in for cyclamens you pull out swords This is a country which devours its inhabitants, spits them out hollow like the shells of seeds, defies them to survive despite the peacelessness, promises them cyclamens but rewards them with swords It is here we live with symphonies and sunflowers, poetry and four o’clock tea, enmeshed in an absurd passion for this land entangled as we are in its history, like butterflies in a net or sheep in a barbed wire fence Where it is forbidden to pick cyclamens but necessary to brandish swords     Autumn Reluctant The only signs of autumn are five p.m. sunsets, cool nights and some yellowing leaves otherwise it is summer as usual The calendar hasn’t changed its pages since August and there is no respite from the heat The rains have forgotten that we are a thirsty nation but the kittens, who know water only from their bowl, the hose and curious glances at the faucet, are content And we humans, complaining now of the misadventures of nature, will shortly complain again that there’s too much rain

 

Free Verse Night in the North Here in the North Night settles gently in a crystal sky a gradual ballet a slow cascade a pastel procession observed through sleepy eyes of hyrax, fox and deer, apple, cherry and the many forest trees solstice soon Night is less she compensates for this by her slow approach, deliberate, dramatic, the actress taking her place on stage as light reverently steps aside and the stars applaud her entrance, sparkling with pleasure on the horizon the moon rises golden, elegant released from invisibility, it beams in satisfaction and here we stand looking down from a mountain's ledge, as Night covers fields and orchards, fishponds and flowers with her velvet black blanket and all disappears beneath it as if on command bats and owls swoop silent jackals howl stars and moon light our way home here in the North at the edge of the world where time is eternal and only the cycle of daylight and darkness reminds us of youth's passing     The Harbour at Hout Bay It is hot today in Hout Bay where minstrels in yellow play and dance to the ghosts of flower children, (grandparents now), looking down from fishing boats on the way to see seals and whales It is hot today at the harbour in Hout Bay thirty-three degrees in the shade of the canopies of the vendors’ stalls, where attractive African statues of stone and wood, bead trinkets and potato-print table cloths call out to the tourists to be bought It’s the same as it was when he was here last in the years of loss and discordance, the years of separate buses and injustice Today it is difficult to choose which souvenirs to purchase, from the myriad of smiling black faces While on the wharf, touching a turquoise ocean, posh restaurants compete with fish and chip places, beneath rocky verdant mountains glowing radiant in the sun on a very hot day in Hout Bay   Read Helen Bar-Lev's Correspondent Report from Israel