Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
Today’s featured poet is Marcela Sulak, author of Immigrant (2010). The following poem is from her new collection, Decency, which is due out this spring.
Ecclesiastes
Katamon, Jerusalem
It’s so nice to be pretty and wearing polka dots
on a swinging dress with a small cinched waist
pushing a blue-eyed child through
the trade winds in her pram. The trees
are swaying, and on the bench below them
an old woman looks up through the boughs
to a parcel of clouds; when she sees us she smiles.
When we pass she stands up and begins with her
zlata moje, my golden child, and she reaches to
touch our cheeks, and her hand stays outstretched,
and she’s asking for just a little of our gold, something
for the bus or for lunch or, I reach into my tiny purse,
drop some coins, since her hand is now the meter
that turns us in our slot.
______________________________
Marcela has chosen to introduce “A story in which neither of us is the hero” by Jocelyn Sears.
She says: Perhaps this is cheating, as I, as poetry editor, selected it for publication in The Ilanot Review. The poem’s title promised relief from the increasingly bipolar manner in which humans communicate, and the childish insistence on dichotomy in a complicated world. The poem itself is composed of one breathtaking incisive, perception-changing image after another gesturing toward obsessive love, ecology and the cosmic.
______________________________
Marcela Sulak is the author of two Black Lawrence poetry titles, Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010). She’s translated four collections of poetry from the Czech, French and Hebrew, and her nonfiction has appeared in such publications as The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, and Rattle. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, hosts the TLV.1 radio show “Israel in Translation,” and is an editor at Tupelo Quarterly and The Ilanot Review.
