I wrote this last week…it is going to be a series, so this isn’t the end.

But I thought I’d throw it out there. I’m kind of afraid to start writing the second part, because this turned out pretty well. I’m worried my mojo is tapped out 😉

 

 

Esther,

As queen who was grafted in.

Branches of myrtle, curved and embraced

into the mighty tree;

A rooted shelter from the bitter, continental elements.

The Queen

who had hid behind the harem,

as the fellow wife in the colony,

clinging to the roof of stones

which carried the names of previous wilderness queens.

Vashti, Hadassah, Sarah, Rachel.

A queen, grafted into marriage,

who sat on her imported wicker chair on her front porch

and allowed herself to be approached

by the wheat farmers’ next door. Blessed on a Friday

before shabbat; while she still worked;

while she still wore the crown.

Heaven help the man who knew

her first. They bent his arm too far, and he watched his farm

seized by a mightier, hungrier form;

The form of new money and wild,

Egyptian hands.

Our poor queen who walked down the long, transcontinental roads,

which divided the lands first staked down by

Benjamite apologists, roaming the dusty trails with their

women and herds of sheep across the earth,

illuminated by seasons of old moons and old loves,

waxing into movements of waning grief.

Not all the women had drawn close to

the mightier idea of walking into untamed and uncharted

plots, fraught with the vile and repugnant ravenous wolves,

seeking, in a pack, to seize and divide.

Hungry wolves, bitter of too many winters

with modest shrews to fill their bellies.

So this new woman, this grafted Queen,

who had her saddle packed to her boots with spices

she smuggled like Rachel out of her last caravan;

this new woman was our Queen.

On the plains, we had nothing more to give her, than our gaping,  Protestant stare.