A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
A Letter for Emmanuel
—after the photo, “Ethiopian Jews are Taught the Hebrew Alphabet,” Jack Faitlovitch, 1924
Bet is for the unmarked bottle of bleach
Emmanuel drank from in the kibbutz apple orchard.
I lift a cup of water to my mouth, cup
my hands, which have never stiffened in the desert
at night, navigating moonlight, each phase
glowing from far away until dawn
when day appears and it is that much harder
to see what is written up there.
Let me bring you back to Emmanuel’s room,
to the sight of the bandages on his throat,
his blistered lips. He will never be able
to talk about it. But wasn’t that his dream,
the way unmarked, monsoon winds ripping down gates
and burying footsteps bringing him, brittle
and broken, to a new land? Closing its sunken
eyes, no water hid itself in the bottle
Emmanuel took to his lips, not even dew.
Through the blue light of the martyrs
in the machzor, their skin flayed with combs,
the lesson is still unwritten. Hot is the sun,
heavy as the world to come. When it arrives,
it will make its way across streams and rivers,
loosening the feathers from whatever wings
finally shadow us and project the blur
of memory onto our field of vision.
Rain beats down across the windshield
of a tractor plow Emmanuel’s hand
on the wheel grips tightly. Fresh is the smell
of grass and the scent of apples I am waiting
to pluck off the trees. Emmanuel reaches
for a container believing it is the right one
filled up with the same steady measure as rain.
In another moment it will be too wet
to gather apples in that orchard.
The work will stop and my heart will break.
The world returned to water.
Harriet Levin
Prizewinning poet and writer Harriet Levin (Millan) is the author of three books of poetry, The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), and My Oceanography (CavanKerry 2018). She is also the author of How Fast Can You Run (Harvard Square Editions, 2016), a novel based on the life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michal Majok Kuch, which was excerpted in The Kenyon Review. Among her honors are The Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry of Society, A PEW Fellowship in the Arts Discipline Award, a Stein Family Foundation Fellowship, and an Independent Publisher’s Book Award. Her poems appear most recently in Narrative Magazine, One Art, Judith, and Notre Dame Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and is an associate professor emerita at Drexel University.
