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Poems Sex: Jewish Positions

Tefillin

by Yona Wallach (1944–1985)

Come to me
Let me do nothing
You do it for me
Do everything for me
Everything I start to do
You do instead
I will lay tefillin I’ll pray
You lay the tefillin for me
Bind them on my arms
Play with them inside me
Pass them delicately over my body
Rub them against me
Arouse me everywhere
Make me faint with sensations
Run them across my clitoris
Tie up my hips with them
So I can come quickly
Play with them inside me
Tie up my hands and legs
Do things to me
Against my will
Turn me over on my stomach
Put the tefillin in my mouth a bridle bit
Ride me I am a mare
Pull my head back
Until I shriek with pain
And you are pleasured
Later I will pass them over your body
With unconcealed intention
Oh, how cruel my face will be
I will pass them slowly over your body
Slowly slowly slowly
Around your throat I’ll pass them
I will wind one end a few times around your throat
And tie the other to something stable
Something very heavy perhaps rotating
I’ll pull and I’ll pull
Until your last breath escapes
Until I strangle you

Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen (2003): Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman: The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach. Hebrew Union College Press, p. 141.

We did it

by Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

We did it before the mirror 
and in the light. We did it in darkness, 
in the water and in the high grass.
We did it in honor of man 
and in honor of beast and in honor of God. 
But they didn´t want to know about us, 
they had already seen that sort of thing. 
We did it with flair and in colors,
with the mingling of reddish hair and brown
and with difficult exercises
gladdening the heart. We did it 
like the wheel-shaped angels and the holy beasts
and the divine chariot of the prophets.
We did it with six wings
and six legs, but the heavens 
were hard over us 
like the summer earth beneath us.

Yehuda Amichai (1971): Selected Poems, translated by Assia Gutman and Harold Schimmel, Penguin Books, 1971, p. 80.

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