GILI HAIMOVICH is a bilingual poet in Hebrew and English, the author of ten poetry books, including Promised Lands (published by Finishing Line Press in 2020) and the multilingual book of her poem "Note." Her poetry has won prizes and grants in Israel, Italy, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, and has been translated into 34 languages and published extensively worldwide.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Gili, what poems are you reading for us today?

Wrinkled Page

Your body can’t conceal its biography.
Tenderness flies back and forth.
You wished to be a blank page,
a fertile land for trees, passages, a laptop or wife.
Wishing to be loved is shameful.
So instead you perfect your handwriting
and manners.
How blank can a wrinkled page be?
Your body can’t conceal its biography.
Nor contain it.

---
My Second Skin

My second skin is longing.
So is my first.
And my mother didn’t cover me with a blanket of reassurance.
Every night I make it
up
from scratch.
The genesis of light
the movement through the diminishing
light, knife
cutting through isolation
the tender care, the loyalty, transparency
of skin.

Does it blanket me like a gift wrap?
Glimmers, shadows, pass over your skin-screen,
it’s the only thing that doesn’t forsake you.
There’s nothing,
nothing but longing.
And its shards are
small,
pointed,
like the lines of a poem.

---
Late Harvest

Long stretches of pretense spring.
Winter is winter everywhere,
and it’s not about the temperature.
We’re getting colds, colder, weaker.
Anticipation is overwrought
not a horizon.

To tread softly through transparent days.
To treat softly the transparent days,
what might break is bedimmed.
To harvest, retrieve, arrays of compassion.
As much as you may have tried,
by nightfall you run out.
And the embrace of darkness
is as quiet as exhalation

---
Hum

Through the humdrum of routine rote,
through the scorching boredom of the humid streets,
I carry you
as a hum.

Layers of body and distance,
this gift that is warped with many things
is nothing but warmth.

Can one hand another anything but attention?

As daringly as the fresh green on the treetop’s leaves
I love \ write.
That’s my protest.

---
Birdwatching

Our world begged for existence.
We carried our valor secretly
no witnesses for our triumphs
for overcoming another day.
Not being able to save even ourselves,
we dropped on the bed
as if we’d lost a battle.

In the mornings we melted back
from sleeping like rocks
into floating bodies in a void.
We watched the birds
from our square-foot lawn and cherished
not just their movement –
their gift of coming from different worlds –
but our own growing ability,
while standing up, standing still
to notice them.

----
Being One With

One armed man
A butterfly with only one feeler
Multitasking was meant for you, actually
Drinking a whole world with one straw
While sailing through it with two-sided brain

You've beem listening to the poems of Gili Haimovich on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.