By Thalia Gur-Klein
 
From one step on a ladder to heaven,
 
I dreamed I was seen
 
and seeing her,
 
far beyond my locked down horizon.
 
Yet underway back I tarried
 
on a thoughtful mountain
 
to wrestle a muscled angel,
 
all night long,
 
or was it my angry twin,
 
until dawn,
 
belatedly to realize
 
how one-sided
 
her end meanwhile came.
 
 
 
Unresolved syllables
 
of dreams and regrets,
 
dripple into the Jordan,
 
receding sign and sound, evenly leveling
 
within its rippling water.
 
 
 
And what I thought
 
she should have said,
 
and what I wanted to say,
 
yet never did,
 
lingers awhile,
 
like a lost sock finally found,
 
while its missing other

had been meanwhile
 
thrown away.
 

For my mother, Aliza, who died in Israel during the coronavirus pandemic, when flying to Israel was suspended.

Thalia Gur-Klein is an Israeli residing in the Netherlands. She earned an M.A. in English literature and Yiddish from Leiden University and an M.A. in Jewish studies, feminist theology, and Hebrew Bible from Amsterdam University, and is currently working on her doctorate at Leiden University..