Bread

Written by Dorit Weisman

Translated from the Hebrew by Joanna Chen

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Israel

      

                                                                                                              

Yesterday, for the first time in my life,

I took home a few slices of bread

leftover from a restaurant meal.

I asked for a bag.

 

And now remember my mother

who always had bread in her pockets

 

and how ashamed we were

when she swiped scraps of bread         

from restaurants into her pockets

I even scolded her

 

until we stopped. Being ashamed.

And once, in a shakshuka restaurant    

in Jaffa, the bread was so fresh and tasty,

I even encouraged her openly.                  

Mom, I said to her, take it. Take.

 

Hot blessed water flows over me now

in the shower, this morning.

 

Dorit Weisman is an award-winning poet with international repute. A multidimensional writer, she is also a novelist, a translator, an editor, a film-maker and a literary organizer. She is the recipient of the EASAL, 2018, Paris; the International Poetry Prize Alfonso Gatto, 2016, Italy; and the respected Yehuda-Amichai Prize for Poetry. She has published 11 volumes of poetry, 2 books of prose, and 2 books of translations. She translates the international “poem of the week” from English to Hebrew, every week.

Joanna Chen is a literary translator and essayist. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Mantis, Asymptote and Poetry International, among others. She is the translator of Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2017), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) and My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House, 2019). She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the Helicon School of Poetry.