It’s July—school and university are out for the summer; it’s hot. This month is often a strange mix of the ecstatic and the supremely boring. It’s a month that does not usually receive much praise or fanfare. It’s the perfect month to focus on poetry—that intensifier that makes the joy more joyful and the pain more painful, and the days just a little more delightfully strange and ripe. Kicking off this month of poems will be Haya Esther, a woman born into an ultra orthodox household in Jerusalem, and who was fired from her job in a girl’s Haredi school after her first book of poems was published in 1983. She went on to write 18 volumes of poetry. Text: Three poems Haya Esther, translated by Linda Zisquit and Shira Twersky-Cassel Poetry International Rotterdam