I.
On the seventh night of Hanukkah, we sat around the table and lit candles to prayers, ate sugar cookies and latkes, and talked about the Maccabees. Flames from the menorahs buckled and swished around the particles of our breaths, bursting yellow; peals of ocher acrylic hissed in tongues without songs, melting and evaporating along with the pirouettes of the dreidel.
II.
The rain came down like a flora of blunted needles; prickly on the skin, but without pain. And the sound of water splashing against sidewalks, a monotonic sizzle in D flat minor, surrounded me like a curtain. It seemed, as if, every drop had a bulbous eye shuttered behind lashes, and could follow its trajectory from a market of clouds to the ground of a city where tendrils made of glass embraced the skyline and the distant horizon, where the sun folds into darkness, is a labyrinth of steel.
III.
We spent Saturday evenings in the middle of autumn toasting pistachios and coconut, drinking champagne from crystal flutes, watching bubbles aggregate and disappear on the equators of the bowls, while discussing potpourri, the Allamanda vines and bougainvillea. Silver clouds, the shape of cherries, would wreath the sky and dollops of sunshine would drip down its edges. And the winds would come in irregular gusts, whipping into vortices the dry leaves around trees, yellow, and brown, and charcoal gray, like an avalanche of sparrows, like a dance of dandelions, and fall to the ground in measures of a silence; a rustle, murmur, in those December evenings.
But those days have passed and people have left, homeless with adventure, mindless with profits, vaccinating, heavily, against an impending orphanage. I miss those moments, of childhood, of togetherness, when we would sit side-by-side, like flowers in a vase, and hold hands, and smile, and listen to the poetry of Wordsworth. And reminisce limericks from the radio show, the tenderness of ink-pots, the excitement of Airmails, and the honeysuckle shrubs on Cypress Hills.
IV.
May be one day, many autumns from now, we will go home again, and sit under clouds, and stare at the moon, sickle in shape against a purple gray sky, and whisper to one another about life, full-circle.
On the seventh night of Hanukkah, we sat around the table and lit candles to prayers, ate sugar cookies and latkes, and talked about the Maccabees. Flames from the menorahs buckled and swished around the particles of our breaths, bursting yellow; peals of ocher acrylic hissed in tongues without songs, melting and evaporating along with the pirouettes of the dreidel.
II.
The rain came down like a flora of blunted needles; prickly on the skin, but without pain. And the sound of water splashing against sidewalks, a monotonic sizzle in D flat minor, surrounded me like a curtain. It seemed, as if, every drop had a bulbous eye shuttered behind lashes, and could follow its trajectory from a market of clouds to the ground of a city where tendrils made of glass embraced the skyline and the distant horizon, where the sun folds into darkness, is a labyrinth of steel.
III.
We spent Saturday evenings in the middle of autumn toasting pistachios and coconut, drinking champagne from crystal flutes, watching bubbles aggregate and disappear on the equators of the bowls, while discussing potpourri, the Allamanda vines and bougainvillea. Silver clouds, the shape of cherries, would wreath the sky and dollops of sunshine would drip down its edges. And the winds would come in irregular gusts, whipping into vortices the dry leaves around trees, yellow, and brown, and charcoal gray, like an avalanche of sparrows, like a dance of dandelions, and fall to the ground in measures of a silence; a rustle, murmur, in those December evenings.
But those days have passed and people have left, homeless with adventure, mindless with profits, vaccinating, heavily, against an impending orphanage. I miss those moments, of childhood, of togetherness, when we would sit side-by-side, like flowers in a vase, and hold hands, and smile, and listen to the poetry of Wordsworth. And reminisce limericks from the radio show, the tenderness of ink-pots, the excitement of Airmails, and the honeysuckle shrubs on Cypress Hills.
IV.
May be one day, many autumns from now, we will go home again, and sit under clouds, and stare at the moon, sickle in shape against a purple gray sky, and whisper to one another about life, full-circle.
1 comment:
Home perhaps is as much some-"when" as some-where.
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