My brother told me to keep on writing poetry.
When I was a kid I was taken to the principal's office.

I had no idea what I had done wrong.

I could not imagine what was about to be told to me.

Maybe I had lice?

I had just returned from two years in Israel and I was in deep longing for the life that I had left there, for my friends and the outdoors and the boys that seemed to like me.
I was in 5th grade now, back to being a foreigner just after having nearly stopped feeling like one in Israel. Now I was one, once again, in America.
I was not happy.

The principal showed me a short paper that I had written for English class. She asked me if I had written it. I looked up at her, not quite understanding her question. My name was on it. Who else could have written it? And why was she holding my paper? What was wrong with my paper? Were there too many spelling mistakes? Had I written the letters backwards as I used to in the beginning when I had just moved to Israel?

And then she told me that my paper was a beautiful piece of writing. I didn't quite understand what she was telling me and why I had to be called to her office to be told this. In Israel invitations to the  principal's office were a sure sign that punishment was on its way. I nodded and smiled politely, wondering if she thought that I had not written it myself. That was an absurd thought considering that all my emotions were there flat as the sun that pounded into me the day of departure. Only that day the sun had a black hole in it and only I could see the hole. It was pressed into the shadow on the pavement. I sat atop our luggage thinking about my best friend that had sobbed the night before when we had hugged our last goodbye. She was wearing her pink pajamas and it was painfully hard to leave her crying like that. I saw the hole in the sun from there and it was as black as the sun was shining. Writing about how I longed for Israel and about everything that got left behind like my grandmother who was my sunshine was not going to bring me back there. I was ready to have this meeting over with.  I had a whole world tucked away in my soul, a world that flowered and blossomed, a world that was full of love and animals and outdoors, a world that my grandmother belonged to and I surely belonged by her side. And somehow I had to accept that that world was slipping behind me and that this world now was to become my life. I found that in my writing I could keep that world alive. And even when it began to recede into the outlines of my life, I knew full well that I would return to that world again.

Within six months my spelling was better then that of most of the class. I had fallen in love with English and would continue falling in love with my English teachers up until and through-out high-school.
I have been away from the English language for twenty years now. The first eighteen years away were in Israel. The last two years away were mostly curled up in the corner of my childhood room, here in America, my mind twisted and frenzied with pain. Now I am slowly reconnecting back to the words, slowly seeing if they will dance for me like they once did. They have been frozen in time, left behind with my childhood passions that could not move with me to Israel.
Like poetry clubs
And poetry readings
Like good-looking English teachers that left me lusting after them as opposed to my class-mates.
Like the toads that died out or hopped away. I wish that they hopped away. I believe that they died out.

There was not much that I loved about my childhood. But writing was one of my loves.
And though the words feel so stale, so imprecise, so rusted and callous, I am trying to refine them, I am working on learning their rhythm and their lust, their truth and their natural urge. I am working on trusting that they will still work for me, that they are still my loyal companions and that though I have abandoned them for so long, they have remained as loyal and as devoted to me as all the invisible friends of my past.

In my mind we all dance together, bringing the invisible into the visible, healing the hurt, and treating the pain, unlocking doors and releasing all that belongs to life.

Invisible people are real.

You may not see them.

But I do.

I always have.

It was one of my gifts.

I always saw them.

And I always gave them a hand.

I knew how hard it is to be invisible.

How hard it is to fall onto cement and to bleed blood that none can see.

But me. But me.

How hard it is to want to play.

Come play, I will play with you. I can see you.

Invisible people. There are so many of them.

Today I can tell you that every invisible hand that reached out to me was my 'self' searching to be seen. My invisible friends taught me the finest parts of who i was. They taught me compassion and love. They taught me patience and commitment. They taught me perseverance and humor. They taught me how profound creativity is. They were very generous, very kind teachers. They loved me just because I saw them. How strange to be appreciated for seeing something that is so clear and so full of truth and wisdom. My invisible friends were my greatest teachers. They taught me about my soul and my spirit.

But still, I was completely unprepared for becoming invisible myself. And I was completely unprepared for invisible knives and invisible forms of torture and for months of invisible persecution. And I was completely unprepared for what it felt like to be asking for help and for being invisible. And I was completely unprepared for pleading and crying for help and for being invisible. And I was completely unprepared for living a life of invisible knives and invisible torture and invisible visibility.

Oh no, I had the sight to see the invisible because I felt it all with my heart and with my soul. It was easy. But to be invisible myself was a completely different world. A world that began and ended nowhere. A world that added up to nothing. A world that split into invisible pieces held together by invisible glue that bore into me like bones and bricks and iron stakes. A world of no sense.

Sometimes at night
i write poems
they appear in my head
beginnings
threaded words
embroidered precisely, humble works of art
with no destiny
they disappear into the night
i swear to myself to remember
winding the words through my mind
the words travel the same routes

morning comes
and whatever routes those words traveled have faded




so, what?
if the words were so important
would i not have lazed out of sleep and into awakening?
are the small journys that my mind makes trying to anchor me in my story
are they irrelevant?
forgotten?
lost?
irretrievable?

as irretrievable as the life that was mine before all of this?
as irretrievable as the child that got lost on the merry-go-round that could not stop spinning?
where are the words?
what words can describe invisible knives that tear flesh into bits that stay whole and bloodless?
who would believe such fairy-tales anyway?

Damn,
i order the words to come filing in
like soldiers lame and lost
they refuse to reclaim their place among the living

I yell to the words
Don't you understand that i need you?
That i need you now!
I don't care if you have no blood and no flesh
I will take whatever is left of you
Your skeleton is fine too

I don't care if you have no limbs to walk on and no will to grow limbs with
Yes, i remember now
One of the words was GROW
What was i growing? There in the dark, in the fire, suffocating...
I cannot remember, maybe GROW was not one of the words at all

Then what was that spark of genius that got lost in the night?
There was a thread and a lot of darkness and suffocation that suffocated and suffocated, suffocation that suffocated like breathing sand through your lungs,
darkness penetrating suffocating ripping through my flesh
leaving no trace of blood behind

Invisible

Growing invisible
Screaming with no voice
Sand pouring down into my legs
and into my lungs

the merry-go-round of glass and razor blades
spinning suffocating drinking sand
walking under air that presses into me
gravity pushes from above
the weights press compress from above
invisible
every step is timelessness encapsulated

Words, don't you understand? I need you now! Come out from under the bed. Get out of your hiding places. I have let you live on your own for two decades. Now I need you  back. I need you back.

Serve me as I have served you.
Putting you all together.
Making you spring and sing meaning.
As a child, you played in my notebooks, you jumped like the toads... whichever way you went, you went as well, with spring on your side and life in your blood.

Come back to me now. I  need you now. Serve me please, I beg you.

Please, open the gates so that I may enter, so that i may learn, so that i may weave and rekindle, and tell and ...

may i be worthy of your magic.

Toads, toads like the letters of my childhood no longer live here.

I have returned to tell of them, of how I loved them. Of how invisible people are real.

if what you want is life

then that is what you will fight for

if what you want is life

then that is what you will suffer for

if what you want is life

then that is what you will be granted

if what you want is life

then that is what you will restore

Hey, you, girl in Chicago, i danced like a wild-cat, i danced like a goddess, i danced with my heart and my soul and i swear i danced for everyone..... Hey, you, girl in Chicago, we dance the way we live...and we live the way we dance...

I can tell that you are fierce and strong.

Love,

Atara

Poetry
it happens sometimes

that what i want is to leak

to leak like a broken faucet
or like a toilet trained toddler

to leak
like a busted pipe
or a fire hydrant in mourning

to leak
to leak
poetry and words and letters that add up to words
to leak it all out
until i am covered in letters
that dance from my nipples to my chin and spin from arm-pit to knee

until i am drowning
ecstatically throwing letters around me
like confetti
like cupcakes

there is a poem that i remember
but this one has no memory
it only has an urge and a surge
and it leaks

no, it doesn't just leak
it explodes outwards

i used to be able to dance my poetry with my body
the boys loved to watch

i loved the warm sensation of their eyes on me
they were respectful and curious
and i was a woman sharing my life

nowadays its the words

i still miss the boys
i do miss the boys

but at least i have the words
i am teaching them to dance for me

but they are still leaking
not quite dancing

tonight

Out of exhaustion I create has
Out of tears I create tea
Out of fatigue I create fate
Out of insomnia I create as
Out of disability I create lit
Out of excruciating I create tin
Out of pain I create pan
Out of insanity I create sanity

I shuffle it all around

fate has sanity lit
tin pan has tea

as

i play life
sipping warm chai
warming spices in my grandmother's old tin pan
watching fate
play cards with me

winter comes from around the corner
the snow is only weeks away
the neighbor knocks covered in white flakes
Chai fills our nostrils with desire
And sanity is as simple as warm socks and a woolen scarf

Into the night we roam
Hand in hand
Into the unknown of a friendship we now know is ours

Into the winter
Our hands wrapped in gloves and in each other
The smell of our spiced breath frosting in the air

Our lips cold and warm

We make our destiny
We choose what to take
And what to leave behind

For now we have chosen each other.
We walk into winter together.

Blessings
I scatter
I scatter blessings

Flowers grow

Blessings I scatter
I scatter blessings
like feathers

Feathers float

Blessings
I scatter

Shells swim their way to the shore

Blessings
I sing

The notes scatter and shatter and splatter and fall

And I like a true artist
make and remake
every day anew

sending my love

to you
to you
and
to you