Poem: Picking Fruit After October 7

That October, 
olives withered 
and died, 
then dropped from their trees, 
unpicked,
their farmers killed or raped 
or taken or forced to flee.

Come November, 
it was avocados threatening 
to blacken on branches, new pickers 
wearing gloves to save unfamiliar 
fingers, used to tapping a keyboard
or chalking a schoolboard
or slicing shwarma at the shuk.

In December, 
after too few came home 
to homes now gone, 
artillery boomed close
again as carpenters and cooks 
hastened to save
the last of the leathery fruit.

In January, February, and March, 
it was oranges, fragrant flowers 
falling on heads of writers 
and thinkers with strained elbows 
and sore shoulders 
and the fleeting scent 
of near-forbidden joy.

In April, 
more oranges, clementines, 
all kinds of citrus and a sense 
of solidarity for the techies and bakers 
and movie-ticket takers religiously returning, 
week after week, one day or two. 
Their bosses came too.

In May,
it was packing basil
in clamshells and crates
for shipment to chefs safely far away,
or picking peaches to thin the trees 
for a healthy harvest
in some oneday future.

In June and July, 
it was apricots and plums
just out of reach, fear of ladders 
smothered by mothers who’d left their babies 
with friends farther (but not too far) north
whose homes had basement playrooms
that could serve as bomb shelters. 

In August, 
cherry tomatoes and scallions
gifted sore knees and a surfeit 
for sauces and salads to be salted 
by tears on September 1st 
for the six who were shot
so close to freedom.

In September, 
it’s grapes wrenched from vines 
with sharp knives or shears, 
bloody fingers be damned,
to ferment the wine to bless the New Year,
relentlessly here with the blast 
of the shofar, another October.

If I were there, would I return, 
after prayers unanswered, to save 
this year’s olives, face another season 
of avocados? Or let the crops drop, declare 
an early shmita year, hope an ungathered 
harvest, enriching the loam, 
will sustain the hungry
still so far from home.

[shmita: Sabbatical or jubilee year, as referenced in the Bible (Exodus 23:10-11) “For six years you are to sow your land and to gather its produce, but in the seventh, you are to let it go and let it be, that the needy of your people shall eat…” The next shmita isn’t scheduled to begin until 2028.]

After Julie Zuckerman’s Substack.