FUTURE PERFECT

*A few thousand Eritreans leave Israel for Canada every year and are accepted as residents in their new homes.

 

In a new life,

you will have found yourself on the far side of Newfoundland, of which you know little except that it is the place where the Titanic had sunk.

Leafy and white,

your future will be continuous:

You will be living on an unmoving island surrounded by a flat sea, what to you might seem in opposition to the gales you were once accustomed to.

You anticipate education and housing,

along with a newly-minted passport which you will use to visit your elderly mother for the first time in ten years.

Your future is simple:

You will marry.

You will have two Tigrinya-speaking children and a house of your own with stone walls, a tiled roof, a doghouse, and a tire swing in the backyard.

In your idle moments,

you might ponder about whether make-believe and maple leaves form a perfect rhyme, and whether that would make any difference to you at all in your little paradise.

 

**

August 20, 2022,

Jaffa