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The cheeks collapsed and the eyes half-shut,
My mother listens as her knees sigh:
The whole morning under the winter sky
She ran about to every market.
So let us now at the gate of the wall
Sleep…
And if Moyshe-Leyb, the poet, tells
That he saw Death on the high waves—
Just as he sees himself in a mirror,
And it was in the morning, around ten—
Will they believe Moyshe-Leyb?
And if Moyshe…
The rinsed fences dry themselves in the wind.
The kneaded black earth turns softer under my feet.
Soaked soil, tousled and wanton wind,
What more can I want from you today?
It seems to me that I’ve…
After you, the killed of the Ukraine;After you, butcheredIn a mound in Gorodishche,The Dnieper town . . .KaddishNo! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards.Out of my mouth’s brown streams of…
Someone in a tales is walking your rooftops.
Only he is stirring in the city by night.
He listens. Old gray veins quicken—sound
Through courtyard and synagogue like a hoarse, dusty heart.
You are a…
The machine, the tool.
Walls without bricks—my cage.
My hands’ holy blood
Drips from the walls.
But the blood of my soul
Drips beyond the threshold
Both out there and in here
Drips the blood of…
You, my master, my hidden enemy! I see you hidden
In the wind that is around all, in all, everywhere:
In my uneasy sleep, in my dark fear at morning,
In my labors by day, in my bread and my salt.
C…
A Jewish musiker,
Alex Herzovitch,
wound his Schubert around and around
like diamonds.
Morning to night, happy, oh happy,
he ground out that same old
sonata, ground it by rote, ground it
to a…
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…
I have a friend, a teacher, with shaggy hair black as pitch.
He has a child (his wife is still a child too)
and when he comes home, difficult and gloomy,
she runs to meet him, like a quivering wave:…