Land
Land by Maya Tevet Dayan We received our Canadian citizenship at the immigration office between Costco and the highway. For the ceremony we were asked to turn off our phones. We raised our right hand. Swore allegiance to the queen. We sang the Canadian anthem in English. In French we only moved our lips. A tall and slim judge spoke before us; at the end she asked, “What ties us to the land?” I thought of the broom always standing by the door to my parents’ house. My mother sweeping out the red Hamra soil that kept invading the house from the garden. It was a daily battle that tied us to this stubborn land. But the judge quoted a First Nations chief who said: stories. Only stories tie us to the land. A land without a story would always remain an exile. My mother is buried in the land by the shores of Galilee. That’s a story. Where Jesus fed thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish. Where my grandparents arose from the sea, starving animals from Europe, and for the first time in their lives saw palm trees planted in neat, orderly rows. We sat in rows and held little Canadian flags we had to wave at the end of the ceremony. Maybe it’s our wounds that tie us to the land. Like a wound formed in the lining of the uterus when an embryo takes hold. “I wish you only good stories,” the judge smiled and we all clapped. We were citizens now. We could stay for as long as we wanted. Tell stories about this land for the rest of our lives, tell of ourselves, forget our previous chapters – the wars, the anxiety, this whole business of the persecuted Jew, and the heavy sorrow, stifling as a grave. We could have turned it all to a distant memory together with the burning heat, the insistence of the sand. In all our years in Canada we never bought a broom the land never entered our house it didn’t ask us to die for it it didn’t wound any of us, I think it didn’t even remember us, I doubt if it even felt when we packed our belongings and went back. Translation from the Hebrew By Sarit Blum Maya Tevet Dayan (b. 1975) is an Israeli-Canadian poet and writer. She’s the recipient of the Israeli Prime Minister award for literature in 2018. Poems from her two critically acclaimed poetry collections have been translated into several languages, and she is also a translator of Sanskrit poetry. Sarit Blum has spent her life investigating bodymind techniques. Her fascination lies with the universal chord of human emotion. POETRY 70 WLT WINTER 2021 MAYA TEVET DAYAN / PHOTO BY MAYA HALIVA ALLON ...
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