The evening goes blind, and you are only twenty.
--Nathan Alterman, “Late Afternoon in the Market”

You are only twenty
and your first pregnancy is a bomb.
Under your broad skirt you are pregnant with dynamite
and metal shavings. This is how you walk in the market,
ticking among the people, you, Andaleeb Takatka.

Someone loosened the screws in your head
and launched you toward the city;
even though you come from Bethlehem,
the Home of Bread, you chose a bakery.
And there you pulled the trigger out of yourself,
and together with the Sabbath loaves,
sesame and poppy seed,
you flung yourself into the sky.

Together with Rebecca Fink you flew up
with Yelena Konre’ev from the Caucasus
and Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan
and Suhila Houshy from Iran
and two Chinese you swept along
to death.

Since then, other matters
have obscured your story,
about which I speak all the time
without having anything to say.

My math teacher Epstein
liked to call me to the blackboard.
He said that my head was good only for hats,
and that a bird with brains like mine
would fly backwards.
He sent me to tend the geese.

Now, at a distance of years from his sentence,
when I sit under the palm tree
with my three beautiful geese,
I think that math teacher of mine was farsighted.
He was right,

because nothing makes me happier
than to watch them now
falling upon bread crumbs,
joyful tails wagging,
or freezing for a moment
under beads of water
when I spray them
with a hose,
holding their heads erect,
bodies stretched back
as if remembering faraway lakes.

Since then my math teacher has died,
together with the math problems
I could never solve.
I like hats
and always at evening
when the birds return to the tree
I look for the one flying backwards.