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Global Correspondent Report from Israel
 

 

 

 

Helen Bar-Lev

Wild Orchids

 

This has been a mostly-holiday month, with Passover preparations and celebrations taking precedence over Poetry, so that regular meetings were postponed. This week there will be two, and we are looking forward to them.

We have been quite busy preparing the 2008 Voices Israel Anthology. Next week it is going to the printer and will be ready mid-May. The edition is, this year, the largest ever, with about 250 pages. Also, for the first time, we have asked poets who are also artists, or professional photographers, to illustrate their poems, and quite a few have done so. I have also illustrated several poems. So all-in-all it is a lovely Anthology. To order, please send US$20.- (or equivalent in Euros or Pounds Sterling) to our Treasurer, Mel Millman, 15 Shachar St., Jerusalem 96263 ISRAEL. Poets are from all over the world, and, as I wrote last month, you are invited to submit poems for next year's Anthology to me, hbarlev@netvision.net.il

On the flower-front, Spring continues, changing floral costumes very rapidly. We have four wild orchids in the garden, as opposed to only one last year, and a carpet of pink convolvulus flowers. The country is dotted in poppies (Horn poppies, not the opium variety), but we are almost past our rainy season, the land is drying out, the wheat has been harvested, and the green of winter/spring is giving way to ochre patches. There are little grapelets on the vine and the citrus tress in our garden have all flowered. Some figs are already large on the tree.

There has been talk of peace recently - we are holding our breaths and
writing poems, about Spring, and the usual preoccupations of living in the
midst of hostilities:

 

 

Wild Orchids in The Garden

 

This year there are four wild orchids
on the upper level of the garden,
tiny, speckled, pink,
they look like angels with wings

Last year, when we moved here,
there was only one,
growing near a just-planted orange tree
surrounded by a carpet
of pink convolvulus flowers
no one planted, like the orchids,
like the winter anemones,
on whose dried petals they now grow
in perfect season-sequence

The people who lived here before us
said there were no wild flowers at all,
and I wonder if they looked,
wonder if the gardener possibly poisoned them,
for the sake of a uniform lawn,
perhaps unaware of the presence
of these fabulous seeds
beneath his weed-killer chemicals

This year, it’s all so perfect,
the roses, red and white,
the orchids, the orange blossoms,
the other flowers,
you’d think we live
in the Garden of Eden

But in truth,
we are here on the border,
weeds to our neighbours
in their otherwise perfect universe,
who now and again
call for our destruction,
from the villages we see
while standing, admiring,
the orchids in our garden
on a warm April afternoon
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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