In loving memory of a lost friend
FLYING WITH CHAGALL
After Marc Chagall’s Above the Town (1915)
Silently, cloudlessly, we
fly
swimming, legs and arms
over
roofs and fields and
streetlamps.
We skate over and above a
sky
of white, our breath
trailing behind us,
around the leaves and their
small voices,
like notes of a fiddle.
Oh how – how do you do
it, without falling or
slipping
or landing on a green roof
and bruising it blue? No
one asks,
but everyone wonders. They
all
look into the sky canvas
and squint,
and inwardly sigh all day,
all night.
It is a dream which only
you and I see.
And nobody else.
And nobody else.
© Nora Nadjarian
Published in "All of Our Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Writing " (ed. Sarah Shapiro) Targum Press, 2009
