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.