The Song of the Stork

“I have nothing to do here and cannot imagine what might come. It’s like the future and present have been taken from me, and I’m left only with memories. Sometimes I can picture them, as clear and tangible as if they were here – or rather, I was there. I feel I could reach out and touch them.

She noticed the shoes, good shoes, leather brogues with fine stitching. Her father’s shoes she was sure. The trousers too.

Her heart wrenched. “Oh God!” she murmured. The pain felt crushing. The desire to run across the path and fall into her mother’s arms. To hear her father’s quiet voice. To see Josef. To know their home once more.

“Besides your love / I have no ocean… Besides your love / I have no sun, / but I don’t even know where you are or with whom.”

He would be awake, Yael thought. She imagined him waking alone in his bed and rising and wondering where she was. The pain in her heart was so intense she thought it would break. She hungered for him. For the small meaningless rituals that made up their days.

The stork cannot sing, her father had told her once, in fact they are more or less mute.

The stork brings spring upon its tail, the saying goes

“Beside your love / I have / no ocean… Beside your love / I have / no sun.”

Is it possible, she thought, that here, in the middle of war, as on all sides carnage and murder stalk the world, is it possible that there can exist this pocket of peace?

Yael was torn by the irony that with the spring, with this resurrection of the earth, war once more became possible; death could continue its rampage across the continent.