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The night draws in around my eyes
Its ring of haze.
My pulse has sent my blood into a blaze
Though all about me a gray coldness lies.
O God, that I by living day
Should dream I’m dead,
Drink it in…
Vilna, my great matriarch, an established Jewish city,
Jerusalem of the Exile, an ancient nation’s consolation in the north!
This [poem] is your patched kerchief, like the roof of the old synagogue,…
My most pious songs have I written
On rising from my sinful bed.
God has given me a wealth of sins,
And God alone has saved me from my sins.
Translated by David Soeterndorp.
Once, at night, after the seven days of mourning, while I lay on the sacks dozing, someone came to me, the Evil One himself, and said to me, “Gimpl, why are you sleeping?”
“What should I be doing,” I…
When the cool, colorful, gentile Sundays come,
both sit—Valenti, the watchman from my courtyard
and his pock-marked, redmouthed, piggish old lady
back-to-back on a wooden bench.
Both of them gaze…
Snow has fallen, with no light. A month
has gone by now or two, since autumn in its monkish cowl
brought tidings my way, a leaf from Ukrainian slopes:
“Remember it’s wintry here too, for the…
It is for us, for all of us together,
To assist, to liberate, to rescue brothers,
From capture, from hunger and slaughter—
Rescue them from the vile Nazi oppressor.
Every man and woman whose soul…
With evening a whistle. Again the sweating store room
opens its throat wide, and we march out in formation
worn down by the heat wave and a day so long:
hard working soldier-women.
And why should…
And then—it was after I had returned from Tiberias to Tel Aviv to attend a literary soirée—then the creative activity, archetypical, all-embracing, that hitherto I had sought in vain, at last…
O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with Communist Party and a broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of…