Here-There Spring  [or Why A Truce]

 

for the citizens of Sderot

 

 

Here, where the sky

has stitched two clouds together,

two brown doves have been sitting

on the wall outside my kitchen window,

their heads at forty-five degrees

of separation, tails crossed in an X

which cancels something out.

 

Do you remember how hopeful

you once were each spring—the world

newly formed and all of it in flower?

Now a fractured sky.  Red dawn.   

The shriek of rockets.

 

Peach trees have donned white robes. 

Acacias have put on their crowns.  

On your sill, Cousin, a white butterfly

puts down, a piece of pale lace fluttering,

impervious to distance.  Even in the desert

there are these butterflies.  The whole

world hatches out, sky cerulean,

just as the world,

sprung into blossom,

breaks.   

                                                Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld