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Tirzi Therese Heidingsfeld teaches English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and is a healer and would-be writer in her spare time. She is currently working on European Kangaroo, her tale of growing up in Sydney as a child of religious Jewish refugees. She automatically scribbles poems and stories all over newspapers and tries not to do so over exam papers. Tirzi is fluent in English, French and German, and gets by in Hebrew. She loves nature and music; likes pastelwork and woodcarving, and is looking forward to what can be discovered tomorrow.
The following work is copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Wordsworth
I sit in class. That is, my body does. Quiet, sage. The perfect eight-year-old. My pencils are sharpened; my desk is clean; it’s Friday afternoon and soon I’ll be free.
The breeze tiptoes in from the windows. It smells of the sea: the tang of the sharp, salty, tantalizing unknown. I want to ride the clouds away, like I used to do in hospital, when I was sick, more sick of the wardens and of the prison than of the sickness itself.
Tempted… tempted. No, try to be good. What is she saying? Poetry? Good. Oh, oh, today we’ll learn a poem by heart. Sorry, a famous poem by heart.
“Daffodils.” What does that mean? The Australian afternoon sky beckons me all the more. Daffodils, she says. Big, yellow flowers in England. A man is walking along, looking at the daffodils. John, in front of me, sniggers and whispers “daffy!” and soon it’s all over the room: “Daffy about the daffodils.” “Class!” we are rebuked, and stern silence sets in again. I want to get out of here. Let me ride the clouds again. Just for a moment. “Clouds,” she says. “Yes!” I think. What??!
“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” No, that can’t be right. Clouds aren’t lonely. They are alone. They want to be alone, or with others. They can do what they like – they are free. Not like us, poor slaves of a teasing sky.
I wandered lonely as a cloud,
That rode on high, o’er vale and hills
When suddenly I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils.
Beside the lake…”
Hey, this guy’s got something! Remember the lake in the mountains, to where I sometimes ride my clouds…?
The lake with the small white yachts further out, and the children’s merry ones all colours, bobbing about in the safe area near the shore. We swing on the willows and the eucalypts and play chasings along the rough prickly sand. Ouch, this isn’t the smooth yellow, fine sand of Bondi Beach. No, shouts my brother, but it’s better! And he’s right. It’s better because this is summer, endless summer, and my parents are laughing at our antics and holding hands. The water is warm and our floats become aeroplanes in the clear blue sky.
“Therese! You aren’t with us!” I jump. No, she’s right, I wasn’t. Everyone’s grinning at me, and I grin back, rather foolishly.
What are we up to? Repeating the first verse, over and over.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
We repeat and the poem grows on me. His cloud and mine understand each other.
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
He’s talking about summer in the mountains. Train rides and climbs down steep valleys, valleys with waterfalls that gurgle with laughter and play hide-and-seek with you, until relenting, they stand still and reach out to enfold you. Minniehaha Falls and Katoomba Falls and Wentworthfalls. Names that tell stories.
I tell stories to my brothers and my friends, and my father buys me a tiny notebook to put them down in, before, like the elves and fairies themselves, they disappear.
We have to learn the second stanza for homework. The bell rings and school screams out. I clutch at Wordsworth between the trampling and the shoving.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way
My father shows us Aurora, the evening star. And we are the chorus for the monthly welcoming of the new moon, the Levana Mekadesh: “Sholom Aleichem, Aleichem Sholom,” we greet each other; and the sense of beginning in timelessness renews itself. I teach my father the Australian constellations, from a book. He teaches me my roots, from what his father has taught him.
Thirty years later, I once again sit in class. That is, my body does. Quiet, sage. The perfect university student. This is Israel, and I take advantage of teaching here to do a second M.A., this time in English literature. Thirty years later, several countries later; once again Wordsworth.
I had never known that there were more verses. I had never expected to see this poem again, nor ever thought of it again. “Page 206 in your anthology. Considered a minor poem, often taught to schoolchildren in England.” I struggle to resist a devilish imp pricking me on to laughter. “Underappreciated,” the lecturer continues. “Contains many of the elements of Wordworth’s great ‘Prelude’ and demonstrates his definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
The smile disappears from my face, as I forget the lecturer and read on – read the lines that had not been there thirty years ago.
I gazed – and gazed- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought
In my mind’s eye, once again the butterflies rise from the hakea bush, the waterfall laughs, the kookaburra mocks; once again we run free in an endless summer of sudden thunderstorms and breathtaking rainbows. Once again, my father explains how God thrusts out to us the bow, the weapon that by facing the giver becomes the symbol of peace and hope: a covenant.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
All my dreams have made me. All my dreams and all my memories. I see the mountains as though they burn in my heart now.
What did I learn of this at school? Oh yes… I remember now.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way
My father is a star now. Like the Aurora, he twinkles down on me. Every Friday night, after the candles are lit, I stand alone on the balcony and look up at him and whisper, “Shabbat Shalom, Abba.” And the star steadfastly shines into me, and a moment’s breeze from the mountains wafts past, and somewhere the lyrebird is singing.
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
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