DORIT WEISMAN

 

DORIT WEISMAN

 

And Maybe The Last Visit

 

I take out the bedsheets to air on the balcony.

In the sink I place the giant blue mug decorated with flowers

from which my aunt drank milky tea. The mug is warm in my hands.

The ticking of the alarm clock, that woke her up half an hour ago,

fills the space in the living room.

The bird that tweets tweets outside.

Five in the morning. Still dark.

The muezzin is silent.

 

Look after yourself, she said in my ear,

the parting in her hair, our breasts squeezed in a long hug.

Her smell, the smell of animal hair and rain, a shaman in the far north,

that too remains in the breadth of the living room

while she is in a cab en route for the airport

for flight AF2221 to Paris, and after that Boston

and then another cab home, to Kathy and the cats.

 

Hours earlier, at the maple-wood kitchen table

We held hands.

Once, in order to demonstrate something or other

she removed her hand from mine

and right away held it out again, extended openly

and I took it.

 

Somebody tosses the morning paper by the front door.

 

Translation From Hebrew To English: Joanna Chen 

 

10 Million Women, And You

 

As we smiled at each other

at rush hour

on the Metro

of Mexico City

 

crushed

against others.

 

Mexico City, 3.3.16

 

Translation From Hebrew To English: Joanna Chen

 

Love

 

My aunt, not so young anymore,

with a hearing aid, a suitcase

and two flowery purses,

set out on a voyage

from her house, about an hour from Boston

and to the airport

and from there in an Air France plane over the Atlantic

as far as Paris -5905.86 kilometers.

In Paris she waited some hours

and afterward took another plane—also Air France—over the Mediterranean

to Ben Gurion Airport, 3280 kilometers,

where I waited for her one afternoon.

 

I came, she said,

for love.

 

Translation From Hebrew To English: Joanna Chen

 

DORIT WEISMAN

 

Ms. DORIT WEISMAN lives in Jerusalem, Israel.  An award-winning poet with international repute. A multidimensional writer, she is also a novelist, a translator, an editor, a film-maker and a literary organizer. Recipient of the EASAL (European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters) prize, 2018, of the International Poetry Prize Alfonso Gatto 2016 (Salerno, Italy), the respected Yehuda-Amichai Prize for Poetry (2003) and the Prime-Minister Prize for Israeli writers, 2003. She published 11 volumes of poetry, two prose books, two translation books – from English to Hebrew - (poems of the writer and poet Charles Bukowski) and she is the editor of 3 Social poetry Anthologies, two of them are: "The Naked Queen", an Anthology of Israeli Women Social Protest Poetry and "Sanity in Insanity", an anthology of mental illness. Her poems have been translated to many languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian, Georgian and more. She is the founder and editor of the Poetry Program in the Israeli TV (Channel 98), which runs several times per week (from 2013). She translates, regularly and voluntarily, the international "poem of the week" from English to Hebrew. On September 2021 was shown on stage a musical about the Cancer ("Cancer – the cabaret") which she wrote.