The silver is mine and the gold is mine, says the Lord of Hosts
Nothing we touch
belongs to us.
We are the glittering,
beaten
promise of gladness.
Sisters, there is only one
direction from this vein.
Some call us proud, but they
have never been melted.
Hook, curl, button,
basket of pockets,
knuckles, nugget,
bleeding river,
metal box and abstinence.
We are the double crown
of these slippery hosts.
When the stacking is done,
we leave this warm skin
and wait for the master
to claim us.
Jane Medved’s poetry collection Deep Calls To Deep won the Many Voices Project (2016) and was released from New Rivers Press in 2017. Her chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Recent essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Tampa Review, The Cortland Review, Mudlark, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and New American Writing. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, the on-line literary magazine of Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv. A native of Chicago, Illinois, she has lived for the last 25 years in Jerusalem, Israel.