{ Rachel Tzvia Back: Azimuth (IV) }

[delga]

Azimuth (IV)
by Rachel Tzvia Back

"We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere..."
Mahmoud Darwish

At the Stone of Losses,
another loss.

I, as half-stranger,
am the one who came
to call out the identifying marks
of what had been lost
but instead,
stood on the Stone
silent.

"What happened really happened."

I flew here.

I am the one
who pushed against gravel-

cut wind

sharp and savage
(jagged splinters from the Stone)

to enter the dark
helicopter hull, and forgot
your face immediately.
You who were a step behind.

"What happened really happened.

I believe with perfect faith"

there were stretchers
too heavy to carry,
there were bodies left behind.

Bodies

left behind
on a dark field:

this is a tale
that has never been told.

"I believe with perfect faith
that I will find the strength to believe
that what happened really happened."

__________________________


In the deafening ascent
both desert and sea were danger:

no lights, no stars to mark
where sky and land mingled

where sea and sky merged.

A sea that flies in the squall.

A desert as fertile:

floods with no warning.

All places of extremes.

I believe with imperfect faith

in faith imprecise
as these instruments,
fragments of the flight here.
I understood only the codes:

caves

constellations

our loss ringing in the dark.

"distant bell (he fell)
green pine (missing in action)
small cloud (captured)
bird's nest (wounded)"

There was blood on the boulders.

I am the one who
learned the maps last,
resigned first to fatigue,
would not believe

whose blood it was
on the whitest boulders.

_________________________


At the Stone of Loss,
another loss.

A hovering above

what may be water, may be land
to return to

(slender, and still
so difficult to navigate)

"Speak speak so we may know the end of
this travel."

I, half stranger
at a stone
of loss

spoke for no one.

I am the one
who now speaks

(I have been to the barbed North)

in translations:

(the tel
is still
mined)

all I could carry.