​

The Butterfly Dress

It was long and black with butterfly sleeves,
orange and turquoise flowers embroidered
down the front; bought in Jerusalem in  the early
seventies, before the first intifada, when  
 
a bus load of American girls tumbled
down the tunneled streets of  the Arab market,
past the arched doorways of the houses,
where women stared out of dark hooded eyes,  
through odiferous alley ways filled
with  hurrying men laden with trussed sheep,  
sacks of cinnamon and cumin.    
 
We were supposed to wear the silly red hats
of our tour group but we ditched them to look pretty
for the Israeli soldiers. Blue eyes, green eyes,
 the merchants called out from their stalls, filled
with mosaics and tiny cups for murky black coffee,
dresses hanging from the rafters like curtains.
I spent all my souvenir money to become Joseph
in a coat of many colors, my dreams woven into
bright flowers.
 
All through high school, I wore the dress,  
In my twenties, when I used it
as a bathrobe, my man worried that the winged
sleeves would catch fire at the stove, but my loins
caught fire instead; we married and had children who
looked at me with shining eyes, who were themselves
the dream that made me put aside my dreaming self. 
 
At fourteen, my daughter found the dress
in the basement, where it lived during my lawyer days,
declared it her favorite  piece of clothing, saying, 
I  would wear it all the time if I could, a thread
between us even when she seemed to most despise me. 
In her twenties, she remade the dress to wear over jeans, 
tattered threads trailing from still vibrant blooms.    
 
 
​
**
Published by Poetica Magazine,
Third place in Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Jewish Poetry