Poetry: Ricky Rapoport Friesem

 

Recently, Ricky Rapoport Friesem was named International Senior Poet Laureate by the U.S. Amy Kitchener Foundation, an honor she received for her poem Afterlife. Rapoport Friesem, who is married to Prof. Asher Friesem of the Physics of Complex Systems Department, headed the Institute’s Communications Department for many years.

Her first poetry collection, Parentheses, won first prize in the Writer's Digest 2007 International Poetry Book Awards. Her second collection, Laissez-Faire, was published in 2009. Her poems, which have appeared in numerous publications, reflect the insight that comes with maturity; she expresses herself in a forthright manner, in the language of everyday life.
 

Rapoport Friesem is the second Israeli to receive the Amy Kitchener Foundation prize. Helen Bar-Lev received the prize last year. Bar-Lev is the editor of the poetry collection, Cyclamens and Swords, in which Afterlife first appeared.

 

 

Strange to think
this teapot will live on
long after me
and someone else
will pour the tea
and maybe
for a fleeting moment
see my image
think of me
there pouring tea
and then the talk
will flow and wash away
the flotsam thought
and they will sit there
drinking tea
around my teapot
without me.

We walk together
hand in hand
and only I can tell
you’ve left me
once again
to dally in a realm
I’ll never know
where
perfect numbers rule.

 

See cars
a red one
and a blue
and there’s a truck
It’s yellow.

 

Hear doggy woof and kitty meow
and way up in the sky
helicopter goes chop chop
airplane roars vroom vroom
and far away the rockets land
Listen. Boom boom boom.

 

 

He lives in his head
she, in the eyes of others
he focuses, she scans
he ambles, she leaps

 

But when the music starts to play,
they meld, they sway, they bend
they dance, as if the dancing were enough.
Perhaps it is.