The ages flowed around us like the steam of a train's heavy plume,
the scent of a week-old flower on a hundred-year old vine,
and the ashes of those long dead whose lusts and memories
we walked upon and looked upon as if they were our own.



Hold my hand now.



I see myself in you like coral dying forever on the skeletal back of a shipwreck.
You said, "Maybe this time we could be to each other what we were meant to be,"
thinking of us reflected in stone statues too old and tired to speak
and tapestries that filled the rooms with ancient echoes of half-forgotten music.



And I shrugged, and smiled,



thinking of you with a knife to my neck in the back-streets of old Lyon,
of you lifting me to your shoulders when my tiny legs were too tired
to climb the Spanish Steps in Rome, of your church-glass blue eyes wide open
on the other side of the bus window in Paris, looking at me as if we weren't strangers,



and we grew old so slowly we could feel it.



Hold me to you now like a lover.
I see myself in you like the last barefoot child in a crumbling temple,
dedicated to a dying god,
clinging to the living stone against the ravages of the ages.


by Shunit Mor-Barak