Beth Aviv
Whose Woods These Are in Chappaqua
August, 2017
Walking in Hillary’s woods on the day
Trump meets behind golden doors with Putin,
says US Intelligence is wrong.
Walking in Hillary’s woods on a day
So humid, clothing sticks, mosquitos buzz
and land on my arms and legs, neck and face.
Sunlight dapples through green leaves, and lights
uprooted trees where mushrooms and lichen
sprout, thinking of how here she found solace
after November ninth, the day the world
changed, the day I lost my ballast, and stopped
reading fiction, could read only the news,
just the facts construed, ex-ethics czars’ views
condemning collusion and hushed-up crimes.
A stagnant pool, a stream, a dirt path; lost
in woods Hillary walked last fall, alas.
Beth Aviv is the author of Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust (Heinemann, 2001). Her poems have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and in the anthology Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust: Art, Poetry, Stories (University Press of America, 2001), edited by Cynthia Moskowitz Brody. Her prose has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, Raw Vision, and Salon, among other journals.
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