DISASTERS OF LOVE -
A DEFENSE OF DELILAH

Since when was marriage not betrayal–
To give oneself to another?
A breach of judgment for a male,
A female suffers double:
We bare our skin, the heart as well.
Our carnal layer, once exposed,
Is tossed aside to show the soul,
The flesh cast off as though our clothes.

I loved a man once, so it goes.
My flesh and trust, I gave him all.
He was the strongest ever known:
But in his power, vulnerable.
How strange his strength, so capital,
His god should hang upon his crown:
The crowning might of Israel,
It took just love to cut him down.

And now my name, spat on the ground,
Shall rustle through the leaves of days.
It’s said I broke love’s vow and bond,
So I, Delilah, play the snake.
I swear I did it for his sake:
So many sought to have him dead.

I thought it best his hair be shaved,
His strength cut off, but not his head.
Shorn locks like scars festooned our bed.
I did allow my countrymen
To slice his eyes, his light be bled,
That they might cease their fear of him.
By sting of manifest serpent,
The chorus claimed he was made blind,
But he was blind when we began
And I was spattered with the crime.

By birth I was a Philistine.
I dissembled not nor ever lied.
I dwelt my days in Palestine,
Kept my place, my only right.
No borders, though, does love abide
Nor hearken to our rule of land:
The heart obeys the will of tides,
A fish-god’s reign, almighty Dagon.

His eyes, gray-green, I loved a man.
With dark, cascading waves of hair.
His body, bronzed, was poured from sun,
His muscles, river stones laid bare.
Yet not a word my suitor shared

And to desire he gave no chase.
It was alone his whetted stare
That held me bound in his embrace.
But though I sensed his knife-edged gaze
As he would stalk me from a distance,
My heart I did not yet betray,
Did not so much as steal a glance.
From eyes desirous to undress
I was no stranger to strangers’ looks­–
But his long leer was more like thirst:
It was beyond that common lust.

I did not love myself enough–
No more than this I will confess.
My only trespass was his touch;
My only treason was his kiss.
Would I have only kept my wits
And seen he saw not who I was.
His interest was acquisitive;
Possession was his bond of love.

By Dagon, I was curious!
How was it that I came to blame?
I offered kindness as one does.
His heart was clenched, a fist in shape.

I guess I made a small mistake:
I let him drink down at my well
As though his passion I could slake.
The burning sun I’d sooner quell.
I fetched for him a brimming pail.
He grasped it and our fingers brushed.
His lightest touch secured the deal:
That bucket also held my trust.
I watched him as he drank it up.
The water spilled upon his chest.
The tantalizing beads like lust,
My eyes slid down the rivulets.

The water trickled down his legs
And I did not avert my eyes.
Demure, I stood before my guest,
But I was staring at his thighs.
I wondered of this Israelite
And of the rumor I had heard,
His nation’s men all circumcised:
A funny way to serve a god.

Distracted, I was caught off guard–
I did not think to just resist.
He pressed his lips to mine so hard,

As though my flesh had been his first.
But I was not his virgin kiss:
Another lover there had been, ­
Named Nidleket by Timnite birth,
By birth, my kith, in spirit, kin.
Her love should have been my lesson:
She too was plucked outside his tribe
For no reason, but she pleased him,
As she was pleasing to the eye.
Yet he loved none beyond his pride.
His proposal was a riddle
Of how one’s loyalties divide,
How does one tear down the middle.

Bring her to me, she pleases me well,
He asked his parents for her to wife.
They questioned, Are there none at all
Among the daughters of our kind?
Why fish among uncircumcised?
But she would be his chosen one.
Her heart was torn and she, from life:
By love anointed, she would burn.

Once there was a man named Samson
Who loved this woman of Timnath.

Between their lands there roamed a lion
Who roared against him on the path.
The lion was the man himself,
A Sphinx’s riddle of his fate.
As Samson put that beast to death,
His destiny would be the same.
Great cat and man with bristling manes,
Fought claw and hand: flesh, raw and ripped.
Their bodies bound in bloody fray,
Became one beast, a strange hybrid.
Then man rent cat as cat rives kid:
He wrest himself from their embrace
And tore the lion limb from limb
And left its broken corpse to waste.

Returning in the course of days,
He turned to see the foul hide,
But reached his finger down to taste
For where was meat smelled sweet inside.
In cat’s decay, bees built a hive,
A honeycomb in cave of bone:
What metaphor! How sweet to die–
That out of death, new life is grown.

What rot! We reap just what we’ve sown.

It’s not from death that life may spring
For violence begets its own:
A swarm of vengeance on the wing.
To victor came the spoils and sting
When Samson robbed the home of bees.
The pillaged nectar he would bring
His parents for them all to eat.
But not a word would he repeat
About the lion he had rent,
Its carcass full of honeybees,
Decay beneath its sugared scent.
Deception was more Samson’s strength:
He twisted riddles from his feats.
His tale of lion he so bent,
Proposed it at his marriage feast:

Out of the eater came forth meat.
Out of the strong came forth sweetness.
If answered, he’d award one sheet
And change of clothes to every witness.
If answered wrong, these thirty guests
Must favor Samson with the same.
Upon his wife the thirty pressed
As Samson gave just seven days.

Should by allotted time she fail
To purloin her husband’s answer,
Her countrymen would set aflame
Her father’s house as well as her.
But not one clue could she gather
For Samson spurned her desperate pleas.
As each day passed, she grew sadder
But Samson still would not concede.
How is it that I do not please?
Wept Nidleket, What’s my offense?
Said Samson, Shall I tell it thee,
What I have held from my own parents?
But tears were yet her greater strength:
Her open pain, too much for him.
To sweetness Samson did relent,
Surrendered: Honey from the lion.

That seventh day, she told the men.
By honey sun they gave his answer.
With furrowed brow he spat at them,
But you have plowed with my Heifer!
Nidleket pled as he left her
That he see her situation,
On horns of honor’s dilemma,
Torn between homeland and husband.

But he went down to Ashkelon
And thirty men there Samson slaughtered
Without a cause save robbing them:
From corpses stripped their thirty garments.
He passed these to his riddle solvers.
What dreadful sense to come to this,
The country littered with such carnage:
The strangest way to keep a promise.
His kindled rage would not diminish.
He went up to his father’s house,
Returned with kid, but love, not his,
Fed firestorm, most furious.
Not welcomed home, estranged from spouse,
His wife betrothed to his old friend,
Said Samson, I shall be blameless
Even as I exact revenge.

Her father begged, Pray comprehend,
We thought you surely hated her
And we’d not see you here again
From torrent by which you left here.
But please consider now her sister.
Why don’t you wed anew instead?
Her sister’s younger and more fair.

Forget the world and go to bed!

But Samson wasn’t interested:
Rebuffed the offer of his daughter.
His heart, a rock of blind vengeance,
Was parched with bloodlust for slaughter.
That man could love no other more
Than his vainglorious long locks,
His fire unquenched by love’s cool waters,
His swagger, like a drunken god’s.
So Samson caught three hundred fox.
He tied their tails and each adorned
With torch aflame in eye of knot:
Freed them on olive groves and corn.
My people cursed; their crops were burned.
They blamed Nidleket thereafter
Of sowing seeds of hunger’s harm,
The harvest of their disaster.

They bound her up with her father
As though a harvest sacrifice,
To be consumed by tongues of fire,
United untodeath’s divide.
Still Samson was not satisfied:
No eye, no tooth could quell his wrath.

He smote my people hip and thigh:
No quarter shown, he wrought their death.

The woman’s spirit was, alas,
A moth devoured in passion’s flame.
Her charred remains, love’s aftermath,
Were heaped upon with dirt of blame.
Would I have then foreseen my fate
Had I deciphered this riddle?
What separates our love from hate–
Is, hate is strong, but love will kill.
But in the end, I loved him still.
Perhaps we choose to love just as
A stream decides to run downhill.
Our destiny will be our past.
As Samson fled along the path
So to escape the bloody land,
All that he left was innocence,
The bloody mess was on his hands.

He journeyed down to the rock, Etam,
And there he hid within its cleft:
The killer came a hunted man.
Inside the cave he took a rest.
Then less for vengeance than redress,

My people came to heal their pride.
They pitched their camp in Judah, spread
Against the settlers of Lehi.

What is it here you hope to find?
Asked Judah’s wary populace.
My men replied, Samson to bind:
To do to him as he did to us.
Three thousand men of Judah thus
Went down to deliver Samson­–
Proposed his purpose ruinous
As Philistines had dominion.
My cause was just retribution;
He answered them, my cause was just.
My kingdom is my own person
And fear will never prove my judge.
Well all the same, we’ll tie you up,
They challenged him, and bring them thee.
Said he, Swear not to draw my blood
And bound I’ll face our enemy.

We’ll bind you for the Philistines,
But not a hair we’ll harm, they swore.
And so he let himself be seized:
They bound him tight with two new cords.

In Lehi he was set before
The Philistines to be harassed.
His ties not fast, save to his lord,
He slipped his bands as though burnt flax.

He found a new jawbone of ass,
And slew a thousand in wild burst,
Said, Heaps on heaps, I have dispatched
A thousand men by bone in fist.
He tossed the jaw back to the dirt,
But then lay dying for a drink.
With all his might to die of thirst:
The strength of his god, ironic.
But he was spared; there sprang a spring
From hill he’d name the Jawbone Barrow.
The font revived him from the brink:
As mercy was his god’s good humor.
Because he’d cried out to his lord,
The Well of Cries, he called the spot.
He governed Israel for a score.
My people, though, never forgot.

Word spread that Samson knew a harlot,
Would go to Gaza for her service.
The Gazites plotted like the fox:

A score to finish at long last.
They’d trap the killer in their compass:
In whispered dark, they’d lay in wait.
By city gates he’d surely pass:
By daybreak they’d confer his fate.

But they awoke to vanished gates:
Did eyes deceive them in the dawn
Or had the night unhinged their wits?
Could lintel, doors and posts be gone?
The gates rose high before Hebron
As Samson stole there at midnight.
Posts, bar and doors were borne by brawn:
Outrageous guile was Samson’s flight!
We live not independent lives:
Like cloth composed of woven threads,
We are the fabric of our rights.
The warp and woof comprise our strength.
Integrity, more than the length
Of days, should measure our affairs.
Indignity is worse than death
For fair is death as death all fare.

Our bodies are our borders shared,
The boundaries of our loves and fears.

Though mortal flesh does come to bear,
The soul is more how we appear:
Our sense of self we hold most dear.
When Samson took away the gates
He left behind a well of tears,
A city naked, robbed and raped.

Our cities now were walled with hate.
The land was drunk on blood like wine.
Who owns the earth so many claim?
The dead inherit in due time.
And to this fate we do resign
With tears for land so torn apart.
We call the land sweet Palestine.
The well of cries we call the heart.
Against the sun, he stood so stark
And looking up, I had to squint.
His eyes were piercing, I felt sparks,
Their steel on my resolve of flint.
The bucket empty from his drink:
Unquenched, he drank me with his lips.
And like my pail, I fell for him,
Though less for him than his eclipse.

But he was gentle in his grip

And I had fallen to his spell:
His touch, less muscle than magic,
When he was thirsty at my well.
Was lovely how his mouth did dwell;
His kisses trickled down my neck.
I was a stream in spring that swells.
What’s more seductive than good sex?

Or is sex good when it’s illicit,
When we’re not tethered by our ties?
To even flirt a bit with death,
The sweet release, we feel alive.
I loved him so, I don’t know why:
The thrill of love outside my clan?
I dropped my guard: was that a crime?
The worst I did was love a man!
Perhaps I thought that I could save him.
I’d heard his tales of violence,
But in my arms he was different,
So capable of tenderness.
A lion’s whelp upon my breast,
My flesh of milk and honey fed.
I was seduced by my own strength.
He fell asleep right after sex.

All passions spent, my lover slept
Upon my lap, his ardor soft.
Our power was reversed in bed:
A shame I could not get enough.
It came to pass, our games grew rough.
More dangerous than all his fire
Was yet, perhaps, the lack thereof:
A tortured end when love grows tired.

How lost is love when it’s acquired:
A love fulfilled, the cruelest cut.
Transgression’s made not by desire:
It is attainment that corrupts.
I would be pillow to his punch.
I might have left, but where to go?
Advice of such is generous,
But I was exiled in my home.
His artifice, a heart of stone,
But worse than this was in the end
He would betray me with a joke
That I’d be left betraying him.
My governors each promised payment,
Eleven hundred coins of silver,
If key to Samson’s secret strength,
From cleft of heart, I should pilfer.

Deceit’s deceit I delivered,
A double coven to buy time.
To profit I was indifferent,
The gain I wished was to survive.
On razor’s edge, I played both sides,
Asked Samson where his power lay.
I would act out his riddled lies–
A deadly game, high-stakes charades.

To bind my strength, Samson would say,
To torture me as you so please,
Fresh bowstring coils, I cannot break.
By seven tendons, I’ll be as weak
As any man when I am wreathed.
With biding men, I bound him so.
He burst his bands just as he breathed
As flame through threads of flaxen tow.
You mock me, Dear, I said in hope
That hiding men would not grow wise.
Did I say bowstrings? I meant ropes.
If new, their knot I can’t untie.
From Samson’s mouth spun out these lies.
With men in ambush at our bed,
I twined my husband, spider-wise.

He brushed off ropes like spider’s web.

Are you sure rope is what I said?
He asked when I confronted him,
Weave seven locks that crown my head,
I will be held by web of loom.
I wove his hair, fastened it with pin,
But woke him up to warn of foes.
As they were set to seize Samson,
He slipped away with loom in tow.

But how was I supposed to know,
He would grow sick to death of me
And so absurd, the truth he’d sew
To lie within his lying weave?
He told his heart, could I believe?
More odd than bowstrings, ropes or loom:
If hair be shorn, he would grow weak?
By just a shave, he’d meet his doom!
This covenant conceived in womb:
An angel pledged to his mother,
Though barren, thou shall bear a son,
Who’ll rise to unrivaled power.
But spare his head from the razor,
Abstain from swine, no wine imbibe.

Behold now, by a son avow,
From womb to death God’s Nazarite.

Named Tavah, she ran terrified
To tell her husband of her vision:
Its dreadful countenance of white–
Unnamed, it swore she’d bear a son
Whose hair, it warned, must not be shorn.
Her Danite husband of Zorah,
Uncertain, prayed his god return
His progeny’s strange harbinger.

His plea was honored by his lord.

Yet, Tavah was again alone
When heaven’s envoy called once more.
When it alit, she hastened home.
She roused her husband that he go:
A visitor was in the field.
A guest in shrouds and mask of bone
Awaited them, their god’s herald.
The husband to his guest appealed,
Are you the same as came before?
By what good name do you reveal
My wife is pregnant with a boy?
I am, it roared, and you’re a bore!

No name I’ll tell, yet tell this twice,
A son she’ll bear, but no razor
Shall touch his hair for all his life!

Pray stay, I’ll make a sacrifice,
The Danite said, We’ll kill a kid,
Not realizing before his eyes,
An angel of his lord now stood.
Said angel, I won’t eat your bread,
But burn that goat upon the rock,
I did not come with taste for blood:
I am of smoke, a ghost of God!

Upon the rock, the kid was cooked.
The angel flew up in the flames!
Amazed, the man and woman looked,
Then to the ground, each fell on face.
The man cried out, Our end of days–
For we have met His hourless eyes!
But why send death, His wife relayed,
Yet sanctify our sacrifice?
The man yet wished that he had died,
His mien and mood forever altered–
By apparition horrified,
All heaven weighed upon his shoulders:

In spectral smoke at stone altar,
He’d seen the souls of six million
Arisen, while below smoldered
Their ashen bones in grim ovens.

Though omen seared, he bit his tongue:
His vision had dispatched all sense.
The infant, Samson, born to him,
Was heir to stony silence.
The boy grew high, the Sun in strength
And yet his lion heart was cleft.
The fault was his ambivalence,
His might unmatched, save his death wish.

Upon my knee while Samson slept,
I had a man reap seven locks.
That all his strength on tresses rest
Was just another joke, I’d thought.
Our fortune rides a wheel, a clock;
Shadows slice time as though a scythe:
Events begun are hard to stop.
My brethren plucked his olive eyes.
Upon my lap drained Samson’s light
And I was bloodied by the blame,
But was blame mine or borne by tides?

He’d been baptized by sea of hate!
Within the prison of his shame,
A broken man, fettered and blind,
He cursed against his sunless days,
Imprisoned in a mill to grind.

His hair grew long again in time
And he was fetched from prison mill
For feast of Dagon, god of brine,
To show as sport and spectacle.
With tender boy as guide through temple,
The crowd would torment their killer.

And Death,
A friend, be blessed, if
Death, an end: our suns milled
Down to wheat-gold sleep. But rest

Now blind, a slave in brazen shackles,
The mightiest came a miller.

He asked to rest between two pillars
Then pressed against and cried aloud,
Avenge just one eye, grant my power,
My God, I’ll crash these columns down!
He brought the roof down on the crowd,
Brought death upon three thousand, death
Upon himself, so proud. So proud
          Was death, the stone blushed red.

No death by fiend, Vengeance, unsettled
In the gorging deep. It churns in depths
With wheels of teeth, its ceaseless
Gears to harrow time, devours         
The halcyon harvest when         
Men refuse to swallow
Pride. A curse
          Upon my poor name twice:         
          His blind desire, his eye
          Avenged: they say
          I made my lover blind,
          Pronouncing blame
          As evidence. Long dead,

I rise
In my
Defense:
Though I am not
The same woman
Who hailed from
Soreq Vale. Not flesh
Am I. I am
A voice in wind.
          My name still blows
          Low in the land of
          Rubble barrows for
          Our bones. Now, children throw
          Their stones at tanks as tanks
          Plow down their streets
And homes. They bulldoze up
The olive groves. What dreadful
Sense to come to this, to seize
The land no one can own? We
Freedom, envious. If love is lost,
We pay double, for blame is yet  ­

Another cost.
We ask of love
To fill a loss, but love is vain:
The void endures. Does blame
Reside in lack of trust
         Or in our love-
         Blind nature? Love’s
         A perfect pact for traitors,
         A country called Treason,

Dwell our days on earth as guests.

Go lightly then on soiled
Beds, the land is sown
With ancient skulls.
The heirs of earth
Are called the
Dead, all deeds
Of man
Ephemeral. They pulled
         Samson from the rubble.
         His mangled body was interred
         In his ancestral land to rule
         A confederacy
Of worms. My name
Was riddled by his curse–
My name: a pail that dangles
Low. My love,
Disaster bound
And worse,
I was then held
Responsible. If love should last,
We’re soon resentful, of former
         And worse, its double curse:
         Love your neighbor and love
         Your own wretched self first.