Poems by Gili Haimovich

​The Year of Longing
 
It has been the year of longing.
And every time we failed its practice
it started again from the beginning.
 
Looping hope, shriveling, quarantine and anger,
hula-hooping small joys,
wearing masks to reveal trepidation.
 
Crossing long-distance yearnings
over short-distance morning (mourning?) walks.
Did we recall what was the destination? 
 
 
 
 
Dust
 
In India everything is covered in the thick gravy that is India. Even the familiar.  
Is it spice or dust?
And how can you tell
dust from dust,
dust from ashes,
ashes from Ganges?
 
You are a blank spot
in a place of multiplications:
gods with many hands,
cascades of languages,
of vehicles, of people
gliding all over.
 
You don’t even have one of each.
 
Yet it doesn’t enable you
to pass through, like thinning air,
to breath out more than in,
to be out more than within,
within the walls of your computer, yourself, your cell.
 
The problem must be you, look where you got:
Monkeys hang from the fence, the guy in the corner sells the sweetest mangos.
 
Isn’t it beautiful, intense enough,
to dilute you over the landscape,
spread you like ashes?
 
Or try this one:
a long, leveled, taxi drive with Dr. V. from the Hindi department.
Your chatter adorns the road
and the road is transformed  
from clumsy bustling
to greening hustle.
 
It’s called New Delhi
and as you go south it gets fenced,
not just around park-centered neighborhoods,
but also with etiquette
and women weighing
gold gems on their bodies.
 
It’s called New Delhi
and it’s already covered with dust.
 
It’s called New Delhi
and certainly it learned a trick or two,
(while you don’t seem to have any up your sleeve),
but clearly history had passed here wanting to linger.
 
Long before you left wanting to leave behind
no more than transparent traces,
the ones you can leave
without weighing longing,
without posing obstacles
in letting it be Bharat. 

​Gili Haimovich is a bilingual Israeli poet and translator with a Canadian background. She has authored six books in Hebrew and three in English, her most recent book is her English volume titled Promised Lands (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and a new volume in English, Lullaby, is forthcoming. Haimovich has won the Best Foreign Poet award at the international Italian poetry competition I colori dell'anima (2020), the Ossi di Seppia international Italian poetry competition (2019) and a grant for excellency by the Ministry of Culture of Israel (2015), among other prizes. Both of her last books in Hebrew, Landing Lights, (Orot Nechita, 2017) and Baby Girl (Tinoket, 2014), won grants from The Acum Association of Authors and her book, Reflected Like Joy (2002), won The Pais Grant for Culture. Her poems are translated into 30 languages including book length collections in French and Serbian as well as a multilingual book of her poem Note. Her work has featured in World Literature Today, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review of Canada, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Tok – Writing the New Toronto and elsewhere. 

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