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67

Song – She Became Religious*

I had fallen plundered then, a sob in my throat
They said she too had become religious:

Righteous men teaching her precepts of the g-d-fearing people
She will visit my sinful fields no more.

Entirely rapped, without the tiniest slit

She covered the whiteness of her breasts with a garment of
modesty.
Her tender ankle [covered] in a long sock
On the smoothness of her thigh it softly cuddles

Her long, flowing, descending hair
Was now collected, humiliated and imprisoned
Through a coif's kerchief it groans, bursting out

And the Rabbi says [it] needs to be cut.

Her look is a different light, no more fire and lightening.
Her tongue, which knew its delights, has gone mute

And her lips are soft, moving in prayer
I feel like crying for me, for her.

Happy is the booklet her hand holds

With immeasurable agility of the fingers
She'll go though its paper, leaf through its pages

The one sitting up high must be standing erect.

And now she has been put on the market for a match
And I, the robbed, am cheated and abused

Painfully secular and loving as always
I've been left out of the bidding.

And she will not come again, quietly sneaking

Between my soft sheets, for a Shabbat's delight
And the miserable me, what more can I say
If I had the answer, I would return.

* In Hebrew, to become religious literally translates as 'to
return in answer'. The writer uses this as a play on words,
mainly in the last line.

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