Rachel Neve-Midbar
Letter To My Children
Sand between our toes and pockets full
of sea glass—you sparkle, each of you.
The smallest ones fuss, though
the moon continues to pull
the tide out to where it can’t
be reached. Is this what
we are searching for, the blue
that haunts us? Once we believed
it was G-d who eluded us. Now we know
better—the cycles nothing
more than gerbil runs to next year
and the next. Yes,
there will be more of you, but
you will never swarm around me—
not in the way I had hoped. Just
as you never squeezed
yourselves out from between
my legs the way I had dreamt
you would. Never gentle, no low groan
as a head is released—an infant cry
rising into a room. Everything
with us was rushed, too much, wrangled
inside sirens and scalpels. I just wanted
it all to slow down. To sit and watch
each of you, just as I might watch
the sun expand into day, a red
reflection—another moment
in my one imperfect life. But
it never really worked
that way, did it? And now
I sit glad, at least, that you have
each other. Glad that you gave
me little ones still willing
to search for sea glass— that milky
glisten between shells and sand,
to trade the pieces: a perfect white
triangle for a jagged piece of turquoise.
Because we all know, in the end
it’s the blue, isn’t it? The blue we search for.
Poet, translator, essayist and Fulbright scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. Rachel is currently in Israel as a 2023-2025 Fulbright postdoc translating the poetry of Abba Kovner. She is also the editor of the anthology Stained: creative writing about menstruation (Querencia Press 2023). Rachel’s work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.