A Question for Grace
I feel dead. I never managed to ask Grace
if one may open a text with such a statement,
meanwhile we left New York to pick apples
and on both sides of the road pumpkins burned around us.
I’d never travelled inside a sleeve
so orange
and when we stopped to drink cider at a local inn
I imagined I saw Grace’s gray head
among the wheat-haired people
and at home I read that she was dead.
.
by Shulamit Apfel
from Pahot me-emet ain ta’am liktov
publisher: Safra, Tel Aviv, 2012
translation: 2013, Lisa Katz
Poets's Note: The American writer and activist Grace Paley (1922-2007)