LynleyShimat Lys is a poet, playwright and essayist. She fell in love with Jerusalem and the land of Israel the first time she visited in 1998 to take a Second Temple Period History Course at Hebrew University's Rothberg School. She has returned on several trips to work on Kibbutz, study at the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) Institute in Arad, and to work as a film archivist at the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at Hebrew University. Her writing has been influenced by Israeli poets and authors ranging from Esther Raab to Dan Pagis and Itamar Ya'Oz Kest to Yehudah Amichai to Amos Oz. She also acknowledges a strong debt to Israeli filmmakers such as Amos Gitai and Eytan Fox. She holds a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature (Hebrew, Russian, English) from UC Berkeley, trained as a Film Archivist at NYU, and plans to pursue a PhD in Comparative Literature (Hebrew, Italian, Yiddish, Arabic) in the near future. She also writes plays and academic essays. Her work has been published in "Mayim Rabim," "PresenTense" and various poetry journals. She was awarded the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in poetry at UC Berkeley. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

I was the innocent

Serpent, changing skins,

Offering you the fruit

Plucked ripe from

The flowering tree

Of knowing good

And evil. You spoke

In tongues,

All your own, yet

Your mother tongue

Eludes you, lost

Somewhere among

The pomegranate fields.

Now I live

Closer to the ground.

Jerusalem perches

on fault

lines running

millenia deep

and kilometers wide

the city neither

slumbers nor sleeps

lest some hairline

fracture should slip

beyond its vigilance.

It is quiet

with the sound

of a thousand

borders stretching

to breaking point

at every angle.

Love springs up

Entirely formed

When the place

Names from the text

Book form themselves

Around armies of pale

Fingered pines sprouting

On every turn

Of the road

From the Lod airport

To Jerusalem

And the sunlight strikes

The white quarried

Limestone bricks

Just so.

Wrestling with

God becomes more

Than a concept –

Love fashions it

A way of life,

Offers it for

A calling

That a ram's horn

Trumpet, a muezzin

Call, a bleating

Of goats or the

Intertwining

Of sister semitic

Languages should

Sound the clarion

Bell to awaken the

Sleeping blood,

The guarded heart.

Love is ready.

She wears garments

Woven with gossamer

Threads of Amharic,

Armenian, Hebrew,

Fine linen of Russian,

Yiddish, Aramaic,

Arabic.



All poems copyright LynleyShimat Lys.

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