Winning Piece - Fiction

by Eli Val, Tennessee

My heart is not worn on the sleeve of a torn jacket
Wrapped in paper and gifted to another in a simple box
They’ll split open my chest and see what I set in stone
My identity will be carved deep into my bones
No rushing water will decay who I believe I am
I will not wash away the letters of my people that
I meticulously etched into the flesh of this body
Scarred hands linked together to form a lifeline
To keep one another from floating away and being lost
Stepping through an abandoned civilization
The only way to go is directed by a compass
A needle that always points towards a six-pointed star
Cold metal resting on my chest carved for King David
Stories of my ancestors stored in sacred books
Along with the lessons that we were taught
Welcome strangers into your home and treat them well
For my people were once strangers in Egypt
Do not presume to take the life of another
For every person houses an entire world in their being
To end someone’s life is to destroy an entire world

Sitting in the wrong place of worship sends chills in my head
Biting my tongue while their services are filled with 
The stolen words of my desecrated people ringing
My ears are filled with praise to a God not my own
My mouth clamped shut in hopes that it’ll go away
That my people will be born again and the forsaken will not cry
That those people who stole so much from me will
Let My People Go was the cry from Moses facing an oppressor
Six million souls returning to God too young too soon
Begging to know why no one seems to care about us
Begging to know why no one seems to remember our pain
Does our suffering taste sweet on those forked tongues of demons
Does the blood that washes the streets and splatters the walls
Drip down the chin of a smile painted onto leering buildings
The Blame placed upon a people so displaced and disorganized
Israel was never meant to be a country it was a people

There is a name that is written and hung around my neck
A name that was gifted unto me by a community of laughter and smiling
Bestowed upon me with the words of Torah in my mouth
Levanah is the moon looking not down at people but loving them
Four letters in the language of my people- Lamed Vet Nun Hei
A name I chose for my soul and my being and the inner workings of me
Not a name that branded a baby before he was too young to know
That did not suit him as he wore the skin of a girl
That rings in his ears as he sits and cries and screams
Oh Miriam my dear forgive me for rejecting your name
The song of your love still rings across our lands

Foundation is cracked and sinking deep into the ground
Drowning without a hand to hold as a lifeline no one to pull me up
Slipping on the rocks in the river waiting to trip me
My beliefs and my being is to gently pull me under the
Swirls of water-painted colours that remind me of angels
Indescribable could they be nonexistent unable to be seen
Perhaps angels are all around us like God
Who sits in the leaves and drinks the rain from the clouds
Whose body flows with the lakes and the oceans
Each tree has its roots connected to Her
Her laughter shakes the ground and rips up the lives
She is quiet now sleeping out of sight to simply
Let her children and her children’s children and their children
To live a life free from fate and from the meddling of lives
There is no life for her to cling on to merely peace
So we sing the Shema to let her know that her children still live