Your Reflection in my Mirror

By Schulamith Chava Halevy    (Click here for the Spanish version.)

 

As toward a stranger I was destined to wed

Tentatively I approached —

Hope and trepidation.

I prayed that as in ancient legends

Perhaps we knew each other in a different life.

For long parted souls look not into the future,

But the past.

 

Our eyes met and immediately we knew

How could we forget!

Six hundred years ago we basked together

In the Spanish golden sun.

We sang the same romances, shared our wine.

In the splendor of Granada

How peacefully we sailed upon the dream

Of harmony and cultures shared,

Of human paradise.

 

Then the storm hit.

Stunned and confused we ran

And as we fled

Our hands tore apart

And torrential waves

Of people and events

Swept over us.

 

We lost one another

Five hundred years ago.

 

We took another step,

My feet still unsure,

The sands so soft and wet still

From the ebbing tide

How dare I look?

I could not know what’s left to recognize

In the wreckage

And how to make the leap

Across half a millennium.

But even as our frames held on to solid ground

We could hear the flutter of our souls,

Never minding time or place

They embraced in a flight of fantasy.

Soaring high above the anger and the fears

And all the distances and walls

That five hundred years apart have built

We whirled by new landscapes

Of lives we might have lived,

People whom we might have been.

We wept by one another’s sorrows

Gathered flowers in one another’s childhood fields.

 

When it came time for me to go,

I discovered that you

Had polished my spirit into

A brilliant gem

And from each of its myriad facets

You shine

To the farthest reaches of my

Ancestral memory.

 

When it came time for me to go,

I did not know yet to thank you enough

For the many new lives,

All the joy and the pain

Your courageous voyage gave me

To hold me till we meet again.

 

Nineteen ninety-three

Five hundred and one years.

Where are you now?

What new stations did you cross

In your lonely pilgrimage?

And did you mend your heart

— I recall the ripping sound, when it overfilled

Above the graveyard

Did it heal soft and large, with room enough for me

That I may always walk with you

(I could not hear your answer when I called).

 

Five hundred years and one, how is your strength

Do you walk always with your soul

And do you travel in your conscious hours or your sleep?

For stay, we know, our spirits will no more.

 

Five hundred and one years.

Do you still look for my reflection in your mirror?