Janet Sillett lives in Norwich England and recently took up writing poetry and short fiction again after decades of absence. She has had poems and flash fiction published in the Galway Advertiser, Poetry Plus magazine, Green Ink Poetry and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, Paws for Pause, and Litro. She has just retired from a local government think tank where she wrote and edited policy papers and managed from time to time to quote poetry in rather tedious briefings.

Exile

What is it like to dream of migratory birds
in the Jordan Valley
taking their rest
between Africa and Asia,
when in the second of waking
you are standing by the spring
gushing water after the rains
in Saffuriya, close to the city of Nazareth,
and you are your father and grandfather
playing in the fertile fields?
You are the young girl exiled from Jaffa,
embracing the rough skins of bitter-sweet fruit.
You are the farmer whose land is turned into the salt
of the Dead Sea.
You are the memory of ghost villages.
What is it like to dream of coming home after the final migration,
to bury your mother in the land of orange groves?