To be a woman: is to only know the word of men?
by Jesse Weiss
My heart no longer misguided
Rains down, my image withers
Born of choice only
Men hold
I grasped in my fingers
A fleeting moment
Hashem broke the mold
When they made me
Indecent
Douse me in rouge
But let my child
Be among
Chosen Men
So that his cage does not
set.
PERIOD !!!!
Wow. This is so moving. I love how you have taken the perspective of Rebecca and get at her willfulness and yet love for her son. I love your use of line breaks and the terseness of the ending even as she hopes for his freedom. Interestingly, we know about her “afterlife” in New York largely due to David de Sola Pool who created biographies of everyone buried in the early Shearith Israel cemeteries in NYC, though her ketubah (and the record you read) also fills in some of the background that De Sola Pool had to guess about. Her son was Jacob Valverde Gomez, and she died when he was only two years old. Her husband’s kin adopted him and raised him, but he drowned at sea at the age of 34 off Key West during a hurricane. He appears never to have married.