Wailing Wall

by Maxim D. Shrayer

In a black ankle-length skirt,
purchased in Mea She’arim
in a girls’ clothing basement,

a white band on her brow
a white cloud on the blue sky
draped over Jerusalem,

my younger daughter,
Tatiana Rebecca,
accompanied me to the Kotel.

When we reached the boundary
where men and boys turn to the north
and women and girls, to the south,

I’m scared to go alone, my daughter said,
and I led her—a girl a boy a butterfly—
where the pilgrims flowed.

We forded the crowd, found a crevice
between the time-molten stones,
and inserted our notes in two languages:

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Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual writer in English and Russian, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and a winner of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award. He was born in Moscow and left the former USSR in 1987. A professor at Boston College, Shrayer is the author of over twenty-five books, including four collections of Russian-language verse and two collections of English-language verse. His new poetry collection, Kinship, is forthcoming in 2024.