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The soldier has slipped onto my shoulder
again, his breath skips with the road.
His head falls to my chest, I straighten, tightening
the part of my back that usually goes sore on rides long as this.
His knee hits mine, then flips away as the bus rolls,
returns to mine, stays there.
I feel his muscles.
Hills are drying in the June sun. Goats
and two camels pass on my side and dark children
sell eggplants from plastic crates.
The soldier’s head falls almost into my arms.
I lift his face.
His hands stay on the gun,
a scar goes from the thumb up the arm.
Swollen and red.
The bus makes a sharp turn. The low area between the hills
is filled with black tents; wide women herd sheep and children
to grass left after winter. The soldier has slipped again.
I lift his face, saliva runs on my hand, then I touch his hair.
The bus stops.
Three soldiers push duffel bags in. The last eats cherries,
spits out the stones. An old lady with parsley in her lap
shouts at him,
the next stone rolls under her skirt.
The bus revs up and my soldier boy shakes himself
like a dog out of water.
Shalom he says to me.
Shalom I say and feel the sweat I took each time I raised his head.
Where are we? he asks and leans over to see more tents and goats.
Almost there? he asks and answers
long way yet.
I want to look straight at him but study his hands on the gun,
want to know if he’s afraid.
There’s so much more I want to say
but you can’t talk like that to a man you hardly know.
©2003, Rochelle Mass
This poem is part of Rochelle Mass' third poetry collection, The Startled Land, just published by Wind River Press. Canadian born, she has lived in Israel for 30 years, most of that time in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. She is a translator and editor of Kibbutz Trends, a bi-annual journal of contemporary issues. She says, “With my husband and young daughters, we moved to Israel just before the Yom Kippur War in l973, and now are facing, this time with the entire world, another Gulf War.”
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