In Our 11th Month

In Our 11th Month

It had been a surreal year.
We were these innocuous invaders
Refusing to be tourists,
We made the Israeli streets our own.
In the past months
We had watched, stricken with grief and heartache,
Every news report divulging details
Of suicide bombs,
Wilderness ambushes
Exploding malls and cafes.
We watched religious workers
Sift through wreckage to find
Bits of bone and flesh to bury
On white-stoned hillsides.
We watched babushkas huddle together sobbing,
And despairing shopkeepers bow, bewildered.
We peered through barred windows
At suspicious luggage in the streets.
We boarded busses,
Brushing past teenaged protectors
With adult Kalashnikovs.
We obeyed them like school children -
When they told us to disembark
We hurried away, allowing them to face the danger,
Those unafraid sons and daughters of Zion.
We wrote home weekly
Of near misses, of wounded acquaintances.
The terror was commonplace there,
Like traffic or weather.
The horror gradually subsided
Only to return with the next gruesome report
Children Bludgeoned to Death In Ravine;
Family Held Hostage In Their Home, Then Slaughtered;
A madman on a street corner, gunning down
Jews and Arabs and tourists alike
Until taken out by a soldier -
An eighteen year old boy -
Made out a hero, but
What choice did he have?
And the next day
You wake up and go back to work.
You get on another bus identical to the one
That is now cinders and bloodstains.
You just keep going.
So it was in that
Mindset of helpless invincibility
That we had our first child.
Your mother came to visit.
We played tour guides through all the old countryside.
After months of frustration and fear,
And holding our breath,
We put on big smiles and it all
Became new again.
A new little creature to care for
And your dear mother to share it all with,
Packing it into weeks instead of months.
At three days our baby was strolling marketplaces,
Visiting the Galilee,
Praying at Yad Vashem.
We were fearless of Arab taxi drivers.
We laughed and joked through the dirty shuq.
We forgot precautionary wisdom.
Traveling an outer highway
After dark, we saw a roadside attraction.
Wilderness Tabernacle Replica,
A must see for your mother.
We knew it was closed,
Just wanted to stop and read the sign.
We wound out the little dirt road,
Pulled around the car park slowly
To shine the headlights directly on the sign.
All of us peered together
Till one of us, was it your mother?
Dropped our glance a few feet down.
Startled eyeballs glowed from the dust.
A confused moment we pondered
What this meant.
The face
Stared up at us, dirty, scared.
Why is anyone lying on the ground
Outside the city, on the edge of the desert
At night?
Then he stood, advanced.
We saw bulging, zippered jacket,
Dark skin and hair,
Nervous, purposeful gait.
Dread seized our ribcages
No time to put into words what we knew.
Just GO! Just drive! Turn around and flee!
And we threw gravel up the little road to the highway.
Stopped at a gas station, conjecturing
Where he must have crossed the border
And where he must be headed. That dark menace
in the secluded night.
A crowd of soldiers
Stood there smoking and talking.
Alerted, they headed off together with
The strength of their rifles, their
Youth, their duty to protect their
Tiny homeland from villains,
Desperately slithering through
miles of dirt to destroy them.
And we took our baby
Back to our flat,
Reminded again
That hatred has still not been annihilated.

(c) Tasha Chinnock 2006