Showing Results 281 - 290 of 741
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
Would you, mama, believe if I told
That everything here is changed into gold,
That gold is made from iron and blood,
Day and night, from iron and blood?
—My son, from a mother you cannot hide—
A…
On Russian fields, in the twilights of winter!
Where can one be lonelier, Where can one be lonelier?
The doddering horse, the squeaking sleigh,
the path under snow—that is my way.
Below, in a…
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…
“ . . . 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…
Words forsaken—fallen leaves,
Let the wind scatter you,
And let me forget you.
I will remain like a wintry tree
Behind closed eyes, still
And silent.
Both the night will cradle me, ay-lu,
And the…
The women of our family will come to me in dreams at night and say:
Modestly we carried a pure blood across generations,
Bringing it to you like well-guarded wine from the kosher
Cellars of our…
Behold her blood flows in my blood,
Behold her voice within me sings—
Raḥel the herder of Laban’s sheep,
Raḥel—mother’s mother.
And so the house is too constricting for me
And the city—alien,
For…
Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colours, and at dawn lead me to [my] toil.
My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the roads…
Yesterday, I dumped on my son the following story:
That my father was a cyclops and, of course, had one eye,
That my fifteen brothers wanted to devour me,
So, I barely got myself out of their…