His Mother

It was years ago, at the end of Deborah’s Song,
I heard the silence of Sisera’s chariot so long in coming,
I watch Sisera’s mother captured in the window,
a woman with a silver streak in her hair.

A spoil of multi-hued embroideries,
two for the throat of each despoiler.
This is what the maidens saw.
That very hour he lay in the tent as one asleep.
His hands quite empty.
On his chin traces of milk, butter, blood.
The silence was not broken by the horses and chariots.
The maidens, too, fell silent one by one.
My silence reached out to theirs.
After awhile sunset.
After awhile the afterglow is gone.

Forty years the land knew peace.  Forty years
no horses galloped, no dead horsemen stared glassily.
But her death came soon after her son’s.

HIS MOTHER