from THE
BOOK OF RUTH AND NAOMI By Marge Piercy
At the season of first fruits, we
recall
two travellers,
co-conspirators, scavengers making do with leftovers and
mill
ends, whose friendship
was
stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger,
who walked
together,
the road of shards, hands joined.
RUTH’S
REGRET
Once, I’d have done anything for Naomi.
Anything at all. Willingly.
Wherever you go, I will
go; wherever you
lodge, I will lodge; your
people shall be my people; and your God, my God.
I
kept my promises,
didn’t I?
I
went to Bethlehem and
to the barley fields and
to Boaz.
But no one told me how
far
this road would go.
No one said that as soon as I bore my baby
the women would carry him away,
chanting a chorus
of blessings.
Not on me;
on her.
No one said that
milk
would leak from me
while my baby nestled
at
Naomi’s breasts. Even
if I
loved her with
the love of seven sons (and I’m
not saying that I
don’t)
I’d not relinquish my child.
Not without regret so strong that
it paralyzes
and silences me. Forever.
THE
HANDMAID'S TALE (RUTH)
Time for
a different
kind of harvest. Sated with
bread and beer
Boaz and his men sleep deeply
on
the fragrant
hay.
The
floor doesn’t creak.
When Boaz wakes, his eyes gleam with unshed tears.
He
is no longer young, maybe
forty;
his face is
lined
as Mahlon's never became.
Who are
you? he asks
and I hear
an echoing question:
who is it? what is it? who speaks? Spread your
wings over me, I
reply and his
cloak billows
high.
Now he clasps my foreign hand
and kisses the tips of
my fingers now skin glides against skin
and the seed of salvation grows
in
me the outsider, the forbidden
we move from lack to fullness we sweeten
our own
story
and
as my belly swells I pray
that the day come speedily and soon
when we won't need to distinguish Israel from Moab
the sun’s
radiance from the
moon’s
Boaz’s square fingers
from my smaller olive hands
amen, amen, selah.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
The
Awakening
Yes,
daughter, go, said
Naomi,
and so off Ruth went, out from
Bethlehem,
to the fields of barley,
the fields of Boaz.
All that long day Naomi waited,
weak with hunger
and worry.
Had
she been younger or stronger,
she,
too, might have gone—
to glean amidst
the
grain for bits
of kindness.
But Naomi was not young;
she
was not strong;
so in Bethlehem she stayed
and slept,
dreaming,
sometimes, of the younger woman,
hidden among the sheaves,
perhaps never
to emerge
or return.
With
every dream
panic
pulsed through Naomi’s blood until she wakened
to see before her
Ruth, and food, and
the future.
*
The
First Night
Later—
on what would be their last night together, till death
they did part—
Boaz and
Ruth lay in slumber,
each, in parallel,
dreaming back to that first night, on the threshing floor
beside the grain pile.
He’d been sleeping when she,
in stealth, tiptoed to where he rested,
uncovered
his feet
and curled up at his
toes. When he awoke,
startled,
they spoke, first;
then they slid,
slowly,
into
the space that, unbeknownst to either, they would share forever
in time,
and text, and tradition.
*
