Your cousin Bruhim, he was a shepherd,
you remember he always had a ney in his pocket?
Okay, but I want to tell you
something else about the ney—
on spring nights, on summer nights,
we could hear music float down from
the hills.
They say the sound of the ney is
very relaxing to the sheep.
For the happiness dance, sometimes there was the big drum,
the one shaped like a kettle and played with sticks.
You know something, it’s at the tip
of my tongue,
and I actually forget what we used
to call that drum.
Isn’t that strange?
I never forgot anything in my
language before.
Well, in my time when the men gathered for a funeral,
together they would sing sad songs.
To lose a young man . . . that was
the saddest funeral.
If anyone spoke the dead one’s
name,
the men would shoot guns into the
air.
Of course they did this outside the
house.
There was always a bowl of olives, a bowl of za’atar and
oil,
bitter greens, bitter coffee, things like that.
The women wore black, all black.
For forty days they wore those
black dresses.
Sometimes they wore them forever.
Oh, I can’t even talk about it now.
[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse-history-in-progress of western Pennsylvania]
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