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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…
Gray as a dove, toward evening, my grandfather came from the pasture;
He made up his bed and said a prayer of confession,
Then inwardly bade his farewell to the world
And closed his eyes, utterly…
Hush little baby. Forty-six years now
the night has rocked itself in my empty cradle
Now a gray head is rocked to sleep with the same tune:
Standing at the cradle’s head
No angel with two white wings…
Here I begin; listen to me, great and small.
Once there was a mighty king—as in the stories begun by girls. His peer in virtue was not to be found. He had a land that was stately indeed. He…
From the top of a spire’s tower
A ringing’s heard—once. Again.
In the chasms of night and land of snow
A little village sunken low.
Overnight, human isles of rest
Warmed by the straw.
Close with…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…