From Bridges, Volume 1, Number 2

The Jewish Women's Caucus

Ellen Stone

The subject is exhaustion; how its shape
is forged by history. My friends and I,
dark-haired and driven daughters of uprooted
worlds speak in the grown-up tongues
of young girls keeping journals. One woman says,
"My mother always told me she was born tired."
It could have been my mother, or my grandmother, or me.

Being tired is nothing to be proud of,
we remind ourselves. But neither
is not being tired: it just means
that you haven't worked enough,
that you've slipped like an opal shard
of daylight past the bone of hardship.
Perhaps it means you haven't taken life
enough to heart. That, after all,
is the one sin we never speak of:
to be superficial.

We stir the family stories, archetypal now,
like dark beets simmering. Grandmothers
who peddled salted fish and grew
potato-colored children while their men
swayed over holy texts in study houses.
Women stifling infants into silence
as they stole past borders, risking
everything, no time for play or grief
or gentleness. They were numb,
raw, bent on pure survival.
Unforgivably, we envy them:
so much explained by suffering.

Someone says, "when I was small, I lay awake
at night, thinking of ways to save my family
if we had to leave the country." We all nod.
Each of us carries on our back a boat of refugees,
souls harrowed to a grim translucence, spurned
at every harbor. It's too late to save them.
As for us, the subject is the present.
How it wrestles history in our faces.
How it blooms through hope, fatigue and flame

Bridges,
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