Biography: Gili Haimovich
Gili Haimovich is a prizewinning bilingual poet in Hebrew and English. She is the recipient of the best foreign poet prize of the international Italian poetry competitions I colori dell’anima (2020), the best foreign poet prize of the Ossi di Seppia International poetry competition in Italy (2019), and awarded for excellency by the Ministry of Culture, (Israel, 2015) among other nominations. Both of her last books in Hebrew Landing Lights, (2017) and Baby Girl, (2014) won grants from The Acum Association of Authors and her second book Reflected Like Joy, (2002) won The Pais Grant for Culture. She is the author of the recent poetry volume in English Promised Lands (2020) as well the collections Sideways Roots (2017) and Living on a Blank Page (2008), six volumes of poetry in Hebrew, a multilingual book, Note (2019) and book length translations in French and Serbian. Her poems are translated into 30 languages, featured and forthcoming in international festivals and events and worldwide anthologies and journals such as World Literature Today, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, LRC – The Literary Review of Canada, New Voices – Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium and publications in all major journals and anthologies in Israel including The Most Beautiful Poems in Hebrew – A Hundred Years of Israeli Poetry and A Naked Queen – An Anthology of Israeli Social Protest Poetry. Gili is also a translator, visual artist and a facilitator of creative writing classes in Israel and abroad. She has a background as a therapist using creative writing as a therapeutic tool.
Like an Apology
Though my hands are beaten
Their ability to feel hasn’t been damaged
But has darkened the ability to be accurate
As when leaving trails on paper
The Dragonfly
I’m ashamed to admit but
the wings of the dragonfly I was
were made of glass.
Her delicate yet roachy body buzzed
in a pleasant but mechanical way.
I’m embarrassed to look at her,
I believe it’s still possible
to see her there.
Between you and me, what blew her cover,
were the wings attached to her small body
not the bolt, but
the usual flesh and bones and muscles
flapping with the energy of a female.
rever I go, it’s always a desert.
I’m always thirsty.
And I don’t know if I have enough in my hump.
It’s satiation that I long for.
It’s the possibility to stop that I long for.
It’s the urge to go somewhere that I’d give up.
I walk on
not knowing if I can stop,
even if an oasis appeared.
Though I’m certain I’d recognize one.
This walking, it drags me along.
Camels aren’t taught to stop, only to keep going.
I’m a camel, not necessarily a female one, just a general sort of a camel.
I can’t see my hump,
though I know I have only one.
If I could turn back
would I discover that I actually left? Left something behind?
Wherever I go, it’s always a desert.
Go Thee
And the way you gathered up your excess soul
before it spilled to the floor.
At the end of the Hebrew-Yiddish-English poetry reading
and you went to eat shwarma.
The way you gathered up your soul,
but didn’t hold it too tight,
because too much of something isn’t a treasure,
because your fatigue is also extra.
And the music drilled too much into both of them,
and your eyes became stars in the night of the assorted audience.
Too many have left you,
cities.
You have no intention of loving this one too.
You’re not enhancing the green twists and turns of her heart
in your walk.
Stomping on them.
Go, go, after the words,
the body too will become aerodynamic,
a weightless airplane following
after the weighty words.
Go, move, fly or breathe,
from your country, from your people, your fatherland, your mother’s language,
so you become a great nation, a small blessing.
Go, move, fly, roll away or breathe,
from moving matter to thinning air.
Holding Water
The day after our wedding,
at the beach in Palmahim,
pierced happiness,
a puncture for longings
to go through.
You held me
and I held water
and said:
“This is happiness. Happiness is happening right now”.
It was easy to be easy-breezy on the day after our wedding
in your hands
when you put them on my trigger
I know that happiness is a warm gun
yes it is yeahhh
What Lights Up the Sky
I am solar powered,
but now I have you and our baby girl.
I have to pull you all
outside, on my back,
just to be charged.
And our baby girl, she is a small sun,
I am a slightly larger sun,
and you are the moon.
These alone light up the sky.
None other than them but darkness?
I need to carve my way outside,
through the dark corners of the house,
labyrinths of laundry,
waterfalls of milk and tears,
to be charged by solar power
that will go through me,
to our baby girl,
but not scorch you.
These alone light up the sky,
none other than us but darkness.
All poems in Hebrew and English by the author. The poems Always a Desert, Go Thee and What Lights Up the Sky translated from Hebrew by Dara Barnat with the author.
