Poetry: Amidst Oranges

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December 20, 2009

Her dark eyes spoke sweet rhetoric. While I stood amidst the green grocer’s oranges, a short, uniformed school girl approached me for help crossing the street.

I, too, need bridges. I struggle with a language that belongs to me and with a culture whose mores are mine. Even innocent trust, the type that aligns strangers with each other, still feels alien in my mind.

Regardless, in broken Hebrew, I bid the child to wait while I stopped, looked and listened. Together, we moved from sidewalk to meridian to sidewalk. She smiled before darting to join other children. I’m acculturating.

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