Earth breathes, an ear in it
Attendant to the umbilical of her clods and heart of her deep layers
A soul in the body that will break from her
Flesh swathed in embroidered rain and flood of upholstering.
The secrets of her placenta’s veins
Folded like the path of dough whose rising stopped
And shallowed and abandoned the source of its pinch of snuff
From the flesh embroidered, woven back and forth
And again with nourishment
Blood before it become a man in the channel of the ground
That sends out its children before they’ve sprung, before their rebound
To her moats and the ascent of a dropped heaven
Filaments of an embrace insist on grappling the trunk
In a field of apples all unpicked,
Belly between her knees and gaze at her umbilical clearly forward
Still not looking to the ground with hands outstretched
To the expanse of life’s basin,
As if bearing wings and the first swing upward and to the infinite, to everything
The scarlet cloaks of bodies, human temples within her
She bears herself
And stamps in the soil the depth of her steps
Before the groan comes with her inheritance
I am full but emptiness will still gust through me
I am full but longing will drip a moment before the new mother’s retreat.
Still stepping for two, with deep exhalations and appropriate rest breaks
For the next moment, that will swim out of her
This breath, floating
A body thrown in her to check the embroidery to replace her perforated earth
This living soul will yet peer from beneath, above
From the left under the head that hugs the right
The whole land is filled with them
Whenever she wakes she’ll shake herself
All is hers, shaping shapes there there’s no bound
To her and she breathes from her holes
The soil, decides for the life within
The tongue that in the breath hides within her
Water, life.
Translated by: Atar Hadari
Read Hebrew Version: משגב יולדת