Touch Touch her fall – easy: it's those comic-strip lines like acid rain leeching on marionettes - pluck one to hear the histrionic hiss of Eden. Disturb the plunge mid-end-act before the gluttonous concrete stage cooks up a parable about a lost Samaritan. It's the touch that breaks. It's the touch that breaks the fall - a tap on the shoulder, a hand on the fist like dawn-pregnant mist on a mountain, a visit to her eyes abandoned to a starless destination.
The Absurdity of Life, Death and Ms. Duff's Funeral Procession Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada - E. Hemingway In the silence two dozen pairs of eyes dressed in red gloss on the sidewalk are talking to each other without their owners understanding a thing. The ringmaster of the Circus of Hades is leading three black beasts tamed and trained to walk the tightrope cleared of traffic, one wheel in front of the other, the hearse with a final draft in its belly signed off with an unsuspecting wreath. Two dozen pairs of eyes watch the tightroad stretch its neck to delay the black tide full of nothing, nothing from reaching the gasping plot beyond the chin. The ringmaster in a black top hat and black tailcoat and nightful boots - the sun wedged in the groove of one sole – every slowmotioned sysiphusian step a reenactment of day. Rising from the asphalt sea, lingering – reenactment of life. Bootheel setting with a knell. In the silence two dozen pairs of eyes follow one silent pair in a casket. Without understanding a thing.
Between the Lines
They coerced the ink
into a sacred text
and instructed us to quietly
find our seats
between the words.
But you know kids - we swung
from the full stops. Stretched them
into commas, made our kingdom
in the blank wilderness
between the lines,
and when their red-inked
swords politely asked us
to surrender our pens,
we dipped our souls
in the wind and wrote
in the twilit margins of history -
come and get them.
Daniel Revach is a graduate student at the University of Oxford and the Editor-in-Chief of the Reuby Magazine of Reuben College, Oxford. He has published poetry both in English and Hebrew in several magazines, as well as translations, opinion articles, and scientific articles. He is the 2022 first prize winner of Oxford’s Digital Education Writing Contest. In his free time, Daniel likes to complain about having no free time.
