RIFKAH GOLDBERG

THREE SISTERS Three girls, auburn, dark brown and black-haired On the well-kept lawn with colourful borders Creating a safe place in which to play and dream One craves success in medical research One imagines fame as a writer One longs for deep love and passion Thirty years on that lawn has become a dream Fame and fortune are distant visions Love and passion fragile, fleeting myths One's family senselessly and irrevocably shattered Another's disrupted by chronic illness The third hanging together despite growing pains One looks out onto the parched desert of Jerusalem Another onto grass-starved concrete of New York And the third onto a drab yard in North-East England Which landscape is real and which is a fantasy? The secure green lawn, the scorched scrub, The unrelenting cement, or the blackened stones? 1997