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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…
Just walk on, condemned to die!
in woods where winds and catscreams wail,
sentence in darkened lines
shall fall upon the pines;
hunchbacked with fear the road turns pale.
Just shrivel up, you…
It’s hard to be clever these nights,
And useless to be modern.
Useless to smile knowingly and observe with melancholy
The language bastardisms of history:
“The government of the Republic is delivered…
I wipe the dust off my books
with a small t-shirt, an old t-shirt
which was once my son’s. We have
more dust this summer than last,
and its composition is different…
Stones are stones.
Why did you say stones?
Why did you throw stones?
Why are you standing here, child?
What’s got into you to throw stones at soldiers?
Why aren’t you afraid?
Why aren’t you worried…
Sky, have mercy on me!
If there be in you a God and to that God a path
and I have not found it—
you pray for me!
I—my heart’s dead and there’s no prayer left in my mouth
and no strength and no hope…
Rise and go to the town of the killings and you’ll come to the yards
and with your eyes and your own hand feel the fence
and on the trees and on the stones and plaster of the walls
the congealed…
We’re laughing our heads off:
None of us wears a top-hat
We just go around with heads—or without heads—
But the Rabbi of Uman
Holds up a mirror to the sun.
We laugh our heads off
When a gang comes…
Year after year, that cruel monster in the heart
growing, sense of guardedness expanding.
Year after year—generations’ blessing
gouged like a needle into the body.
I have wrenched it with irons…
“ . . . And all those who are on the left side go and wander in the world and seek to dress themselves in the body.”—From Zohar Beraishit
When the Havdoleh candle is extinguished,
In Gehenna, the…