I am a Jew in Love…
A wanderer punished by the God
I could not obey,
Cast into deserts of thirst because
my tongue refused
The Manna and Salwa
He poured from the heavens.
I hungered for another taste….
Your mouth, not his mercy.
And for that sin, I was exiled.
I am a Jew in love…
Cursed to roam in the burning sand of your absence,
My skin cracking like ancient parchment,
Each wound a scripture rewritten by longing.
Even God turned his face from me,
For I worshipped your shadow
instead of his throne.
I am a Jew in love….
Rejecting his celestial bread,
His divine quail,
Because nothing holy ever fed me
the way your body once did…
Salt of your collarbone,
Honey of your inner wrists,
Heat between your fingers where I buried my prayers, my beliefs,
How could Manna ever compete with that?
I am a Jew in love…
Punished for confusing your darkness with revelation,
For choosing the ecstasy of forbidden flesh
over the discipline of heaven.
So he sent me wandering forty lifetimes,
Parched, delirious, aching
for the taste of a sin I cannot unlove,
Now unhidden…
I am a Jew in love….
Watching divine food fall from the sky,
Yet starving myself to remember you.
Every refusal another lash of God’s anger,
Every memory another blister of fate,
Every night a trial where I testify
that even damnation feels soft
compared to losing you.
I am a Jew in love….
and exile is the only covenant left to me,
A punishment carved into my name.
For I denied his bread,
I chose the hunger of your ghost….
and now all the angels whisper
that I will never be fed again.
Still, I wander with your taste
sealed on my tongue,
A sacred famine,
An erotic curse,
A devotion darker than heaven…..
and God, in his infinite wrath,
Let me live,
Let me love,
And, let me laugh genuinely from heart with your presence,
If not you then who else?!
You were my Manna and Salwa that I declined,
Now I am in ‘Salvation’!
In refusal of love and desire
I couldn’t intake!
Heavenly things are forbidden for me now,
I am a sinner burning in hellish perish!
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame:12.2.25, 7.13 pm, Mirpur Cantonment.