Your Reflection in my Mirror
Schulamith Chava Halevy
As toward a stranger I was destined to wed
Tentatively I approached --
Hope and trepidation.
I prayed that as in ancient legends
Perhaps we knew each other in a different life.
For long parted souls look not into the future,
But the past.
Our eyes met and immediately we knew
How could we forget!
Six hundred years ago we basked together
In the Spanish golden sun.
We sang the same romances, shared our wine.
In the splendor of Granada
How peacefully we sailed upon the dream
Of harmony and cultures shared,
Of human paradise.
Then the storm hit.
Stunned and confused we ran
And as we fled
Our hands tore apart
And torrential waves
Of people and events
Swept over us.
We lost one another
Five hundred years ago.
We took another step,
My feet still unsure,
The sands so soft and wet still
From the ebbing tide
How dare I look?
I could not know what's left to recognize
In the wreckage
And how to make the leap
Across half a millennium.
But even as our frames held on to solid ground
We could hear the flutter of our souls,
Never minding time or place
They embraced in a flight of fantasy.
Soaring high above the anger and the fears
And all the distances and walls
That five hundred years apart have built
We whirled by new landscapes
Of lives we might have lived,
People whom we might have been.
We wept by one another's sorrows
Gathered flowers in one another's childhood fields.
When it came time for me to go,
I discovered that you
Had polished my spirit into
A brilliant gem
And from each of its myriad facets
You shine
To the farthest reaches of my
Ancestral memory.
When it came time for me to go,
I did not know yet to thank you enough
For the many new lives,
All the joy and the pain
Your courageous voyage gave me
To hold me till we meet again.
Nineteen ninety-three
Five hundred and one years.
Where are you now?
What new stations did you cross
In your lonely pilgrimage?
And did you mend your heart
-- I recall the ripping sound, when it overfilled
Above the graveyard
Did it heal soft and large, with room enough for me
That I may always walk with you
(I could not hear your answer when I called).
Five hundred years and one, how is your strength
Do you walk always with your soul
And do you travel in your conscious hours or your sleep?
For stay, we know, our spirits will no more.
Five hundred and one years.
Do you still look for my reflection in your mirror?