Babushka’s Beets

We skate across bloodstains leaking from Babushka’s beets.

A concertina stretches and contracts across the hours and years

of a history that may have happened in this valley.

We image Babushka’s memories stored in the gaps

between rotted roots and burnt out thatches,

her muffled cadences lost to archives

by her offspring, who were propelled

hostage in relentless transits to unfamiliar lodgings,

some left to gasp like fish, some let loose

at last to breathe the living air.

 

 

 

(Babushka’s Beets was published in the print journal Voices Israel 2014).

 

 

 

Mori Glaser grew up in the UK and moved to Israel thirty years ago. She has written a variety of articles, blogs and creative non-fiction throughout her career in cross-cultural facilitation, community development, and international relations. Mori writes poetry and fiction as a member of creative writing workshops in Jerusalem. Her poetry has been published in literary journals: Writers Hub, Persimmon Tree, Women in Judaism and 2014 Voices Israel. Her prose appears in the Akashic Books website Thursdaze series and in Arc 2015, the journal of the Israel Association of Writers in English.

 

 

 

Image by Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz. Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz is a writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She (infrequently) blogs about her creative life at wwwonewriter.blogspot.com.