Page 15 - Issue 19

I wrote this poem in a yom garin with my kvutza! I had
the idea for a while to write a poem about how I
learned to word for “full” in Spanish and Hebrew. In
university I studied for one semester in Nicaragua,
which was very amazing and also showed a lot of bad
impacts of American foreign policy and global
neoliberalism. There was a drought because of
climate change, so in the city where I lived they only
had running water a few hours a day. I learned the
word llenar (to fill) from my host mother filling
giant buckets in the morning. When my kvutza was on
our aliyah seminar, we worked in the mataim on
Kibbutz Ravid and learned a short song about filling
up your crate: dolev maleh. I decided to write the
poem about identity and the question of if you can
ever be full of identities or if there is always more
room for new ones. Something that I love about the
movement is that identity is so connected to
responsibility, so figuring out who you are has a lot
of consequences. It makes it scary but also more
meaningful to connect with new people and places.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I adjust to life
in israel (I made aliyah seven weeks ago!), form new
relationships with my kvutza, and enter a new
mesima. I decided to write the poem in different
languages because language is a big part of
discovering and forming new connections, and
because language is something that connects the
world movement.