Showing Results 111 - 120 of 1777
I saw my father drowning
In surging days.
His weak hand gave a last white flutter
In the distance—
And he was gone.
I kept on alone
Along the shore,
A boy still,
With small, thin legs,
And have…
A visitor came to the shtetl,
A stranger, with unrest in his step . . .
No-one recognized his unrest. No-one asked him:
“Stranger, are you weary?”
Across the blue sky the evening drew its curtain…
Man has separated lust and sorrow.
But God holds them together like day and night.
I know lust. I know intense suffering.
I praise God’s one name.
Translated by David Soeterndorp.
A Jewish Wedding
Deep in fields the klezmers can be heard
Driving horses foaming at the mouth,
Relatives, both poor and rich, arrive
To Reb Sane’s daughter’s wedding feast. [ . . . ]
But from a…
How can it be told in simple, quiet words?
How can you gloss over the sharp outcry
So that people will listen to it and be silent,
With mute eyes, even without a sigh?
Without a sigh, since every…
My palms are raised toward you,
To the little light
Which I still have in your eyes,
And you—sharpen your teeth
For the softness of my yellow flesh;
And were this flesh to be thrown upon the field
An…
Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan. This, then, is the line of Jacob:
At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended…
He sings in the courtyard, clad in rags
A small, poor chap, a crazed Jew.
People drive him away, God has muddled his wits
Ages and exile have confused his tongue
He wails and he dances, weeps and…
A mountain in the desert.
On the desert mountain—
Nine,
Nine tall men.
There must be something here—
The Nine want something here—
And the tenth man?
He stands at the head of them…
[A deserted place on the bank of the river outside of Prague. Daybreak. All is dark and silent. Reb Levi Bar Bezalel, or The Maharal, an old man of seventy, stands over an outlined mound…