If I Can

shape-change myself if I can
reassemble the rubble of my vision
so I can re-see
dragonflies, apocalypses, trivia
 
if I can have new tastebuds
to suit my re-embodied self
and graze on a fresh diet
of sweet euphoria and bitter disappointment
 
if I can have my ears sharpened
for the music of the spheres
and the hubris of storms
human and inhuman
 
if I can turn turncoat
on myself
sacrifice the hatchling I grew from
with relief and regret
 
if I can pick my despair off the floor
and pin it near my heart
obscure and familiar
if I can believe in metamorphosis
 
if I can moult out of my fears
unshackle my serenity
frailer than a newborn
yet sturdier than ever
 
if I can alter my ecology
exchange the surface waters
for the deep ocean floor
if I can be eternally adaptable
 

Judith Wilkinson

in collection Sphinx Moth, 2026, Poetry Salzburg,
ISBN 978-3-901993-90-9

 
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Lot’s Wife

Everybody has me figured out:
the tragic woman who got buried in her tears,
her own salt,
 
while her gritty husband
made it out, across the mountains.
He was the dynamic one.
 
Maybe I believe in staying put
and seeing things through
to some kind of end.
 
Here I watched my children grow,
pitching their sandcastles along the shore,
floating in the salt water some call God’s tears.
 
Buoyed up effortlessly,
they didn’t need to learn to swim,
they kept floating into the future.
 
Every morning I saw the sun
climb up Jordan’s mountains.
The whole picture cradled us.
 
Who knows how many transformations
got embedded here,
mine, not God’s.
 
Centuries have passed.
I remain here, beyond any ending.
Even my fears are here to stay.
 
The world around me has crumbled,
the sea is drying, the roads are full of sinkholes,
cities lie in ruins.
 
I go on crying.
I had the temerity to cry so much
that I became eternal.
 

Judith Wilkinson

in collection Sphinx Moth, 2026, Poetry Salzburg,
ISBN 978-3-901993-90-9

 
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Yiddish Mama

Optimism wouldn’t fly in your book.
Long before they loomed
you would spot them,
problems on your path.
 
Growing up fast in occupied Holland,
daughter of a Jewess,
you were schooled in the unsolvable.
 
Trust didn’t come easily.
You took your time making friends
and if you had to choose between
the reliable and the lively,
you’d choose the reliable any day.
 
Embracing a language of doubt,
you fretted over injustices,
the tiniest slight
undermining you.
 
But when I fell ill, and stayed ill endlessly,
you ditched your vocabulary,
to shower me with confidence.
 
You must have dug deep
to find a new language,
one that had not soothed you.
 
Nobody could calm me the way you could.
With a new-found contempt for
any writing on the wall,
you drew on your doggedness,
scouring the health-food shops
for auspicious panaceas,
cooking me all your best recipes,
serving me your chicken soup
‘like a true Yiddish mama,’ as you’d say,
reading me passages
from the novels you loved,
about renewal,
always about renewal.
 

Judith Wilkinson

in collection Sphinx Moth, 2026, Poetry Salzburg,
ISBN 978-3-901993-90-9

 
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Under the Radar

     ‘Life has made me a child of the desert. It reconciled me with my past.’
               Malika Oufkir, Stolen Lives, Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
 
Here’s one version of me:
 
I was fathered twice, the daughter of an ambitious Berber,
confiscated by a King.
After the two had clashed,
I was parented by a prison.
 
In that throttled space
the remnants of our family huddled together,
nursing our shell-shock.
Like Ulysses, we kept dreaming of a return.
 
A caged Scheherazade, I invented
the same version of ourselves in another landscape.
 
But I forgot about the fourth dimension,
how time dug roads in my skin that lead nowhere.
Today I am a young woman – half-modern –
in a middle-aged body that has nothing to do with me.  
In my head I am the one
who didn’t negotiate time,
the obstinate one who solved conundrums
such as how to cook a rotten egg,
divide the scraps like treasure,
handle the rats, scorpions, infernal desert locusts,
and how to escape, alive.
That version of myself slipped under the radar of time
to emerge in different languages, free as a ghost.
 
The desert is the place where I seem to fit –
that constant, sandy looking glass
where I sense my image intact.
There, I dare to step straight through
and arrive on the other side
divided,
just like everyone else.
 
Only who would have thought I’d be so new
 

Judith Wilkinson

in collection In Desert, 2021, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-912524-89-1

 
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