Wild Roadkill

ELISHA PORAT

The list of wild animals killed
in this terrible spring, on
the road whose number is five eight
one, grows longer by
the day: Add, my friends tell me,
a dead marten. Add a flattened
badger. Add a fledgling kingfisher,
squashed. A small blue feather
quivering on the warm asphalt.
On my evening bike ride, in the darkness,
I glide by in silence,
whooshing towards them, pedaling past.
Exactly as I passed by then,
in that accursed summer: passed by
those lying in the long rows,
in the shade of the protected northern wall
of the smoking Jenin police station.

Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy Eisner Spring 2007

Elisha Porat writes on a kibbutz in Israel.

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