and over until it scarred,
that my body might never forget whilst she slept
the one whom my soul loves.
21I set my pot on the fire
and the steam curled away
from the heat in my fingers.
22My fingers could have been fire-sticks.
They dripped thick myrrh as candles running wax,
longing, forgive me, to touch.
23I was quick to stir tea
and warm up the rocks that I might bake cakes for you.
24I took three measures of flour and hastily kneaded.
25My fingers spread outward over the dough,
wings of a white dove a-flutter.
26I baked you honey cakes with crumbled mint
and I left them by your door every morning,
and so my fingers touch you
~wrote Anatiya.
27At night I lay awake on my couch.
This love threw me sandward into a swoon
countless times throughout the day
and I began to feel myself pale and unearthly.
28I wondered whether I was human at all,
or whether—God forgive me one untamed thought!—
perhaps I myself was an angel,
muted so as not to distract from my singular mission:
29to sustain my love with cakes
and protect the embers of his precious light.
30Or perhaps I am just sick with love
and this fever keeps my feet just over this land
so that I hover like a gold-laced cloud,
dizzy and tearful,
clinging for my dear life
to a mountaintop.
31I might kiss you never,
but if I could save you but once,
if I could be there one time
to throw my body before a poisoned dart,
32if I could be there one time only
to eat up your depression
and die of it in your place,
it would be sweeter to my soul than a kiss.
No treasure could match it
~wrote Anatiya.
2
Even as a youth,
before the flower of my maidenhood had bloomed,
I have been devoted to you; your secret bride
whom you did not know.
2When my desire pierced me
like a wreath of thorns around my head,
and when the pain was sharp behind my eyes,
I escaped into the wilderness
and filled my arms with nature’s harvest.
3I stretched out in beds of blossoms
until my skin was pressed with petals.
4I tromped barefooted, plowing the soil with my toes.
5At the height of my sickness for you, Jeremiah,
I threw my arms around a sturdy tree
and my legs over a stubby branch,
and, 6O God! Let my piety remain intact!
7I assure you no man has known me, my dear,
but that tree did break my virgin seal.
I kissed its wooden heart
~wrote Anatiya.
8My father did leave when I was a child.
He had chewed on my mother’s heart,
sucked it like a cluster of purple grapes through his teeth,
but she still eked out some love for me.
9Never did I ask her “Where is my father?”
10What need had I of frightful eyes and a beard of thorns?
11Purple cloth has the high price of gold
yet my mother was clothed in purple for free,
like swollen leeches under her skin.
She was my mother-queen.
12He abandoned us
and at five I did the work of a bondsman,
bearing bundles on my shoulders like a pack mule,
teetering and scraping along the corners of the farmers’ fields.
13My sapling-thighs strained like an ox,
rolling a stone wheel to grind that wheat into flour.
14My mother made loaves to sell to merchants.
15She wept over my neck
which was too young and might break
under the weighty water jugs
I bore home atop my head.
16My neck was lovely and slender as a bride’s wrist
peeking out from under ceremonial wraps.
17I grew cedar-strong and sun-callused,
black as the tents of Kedar,
industrious as an insect dragging twice its weight
with its wispy baby-hair
