In my hollowest moments I wish my mother named me after a breathing thing
a name with a voice to choke it over I pray for RachelRebeccaLeah, nice Jewish
girl names that never die bonded to a land we bulldozed to make our own, but
a man calls me the new Josephus curses me in Hebrew and I swear I cough
up blood i want to tell him the importance of names how these labels do not peel
off as easily as skin but in this language everything is made to build and nothing
is meant to grow, a boy from Sunday school tells me Israel is the only place he
feels safe and all my arguments fall back down my throat our wounds are too similar
six sided a sting so ancient it is made synonymous, yet in Hebron a settler nearly kills a man
prayer shawl taut with effort and is home in time for shabbat dinner, so what is there
to say about my heartache that its names have brought about wars how my G-d
doesn’t agree with my politics how my people cry adultery kiss the stones
before they fly aim for all the tender spots that bruise easiest, and i think only yiddish
has language for this hurt this betrayal we all cant seem to un-feel the cultural memory
we can’t wipe clean, I want to go home but what is mine is everyone’s I want to know
what we were like before we had trauma to re-enact but there is no answer only solution
final as death, the war sings on and i’m having an identity crisis the bodies pile higher
and I forget the words to V’ahavta, I tell myself hurt people hurt people, I tell myself
one day history may absolve us but my half prayers taste of bile and the Wailing
Wall spits them all back out.
A recording of the author reading “In Which the Wall Spits Back My Prayers”:
Nesha Ruther is a poet hailing from Takoma Park, Maryland. She was a member of the 2015 DC Youth Slam Team and a 2016 YoungArts winner in spoken word. She currently attends the University of Wisconsin Madison as part of the tenth cohort of First Wave.
Featured image credit: Pixabay.com/MaciejJaszczolt.
