Goat Song by Brad Kessler

Author:Brad Kessler
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

1¾ gallons

1 gallon

Scrubbed buckets.

Made chèvre from four gallons.

JULY 21

In my lap—a doe,

And in her lap—a harp;

She plays it with her fingers,

And kills me with her heart

—SA’ADIA IBN DANAAN, FIFTEENTH-CENTURY GRANADA

The Hebrew and Arab poems about gazelles flourished in Andalusia between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries with the blending there of Jewish, Ladino, Arab, and Spanish cultures. This was the so-called Golden Age of Hebrew literature. When people talk of this period in Spain, they speak of a literary and cultural “paradise.” “Andalus,” wrote the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “might be here or there, or anywhere…Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem.” Yet during that Golden Age poets still longed for another place, and the gazelle (or doe) stood in for that lost land. Then both Jews and Arabs were forced from Spain, and another land was lost.

Does it take exile to invent the whole concept of a land of milk and honey—a Zion, a paradise—a land some can enter and some cannot?

MORNING

EVENING

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