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An old Jew asked me near the Jaffa Gate:
“Is the Saxon Garden still there? The same as ever?
Is there a fountain? At the entrance from Czysta Street
In the old days confectioners had a shop there…
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…
And so its pain is unremitting, like an amputated leg
This ash and feathery void chafes at us,
They say two willows were seen in Mazowsze
wearing green prayer shawls also a market stall
in the middle…
You will come back.
You will, with God’s help, come back
With a far-off, alien look.
(I’m preparing myself,
I already know,
I’ve seen how they come back.)
You will sit in your regular chair, unsure
A…
By these eyes that have seen the woe and grief,
their outcries heaving to my heart’s embrace,
by this compassion which taught me: forgive
till the time did come too awful for grace—
I have taken this…
On a day transparent with light
like a landscape by Monet,
my childhood broke away
from a small Jewish town
and glided on ice
blue in the distance—
while a small cloud hovered in me
like a cloud of a…
I have always backed off from the word.
In the Thirties Europe meant French. But was it only then? Not in earlier centuries? A bloody lesson learned that Europe was Balmazújváros as well as Notre…
I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure
I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament
for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine
so I dully…
How long this staring through a window
In an alley-way by few remembered,
Into the obscure, into a room
Empty of all but its walls
Where pictures hang all in shadow
But for one of mild eyes wide,
As…
for Aaron Lebedeff (1873–1960), performer on the Yiddish stage
Bewildering clarity of tongues:
names you never heard, food
you never ate, a wild dance
you never learned, light hanging
in the sky…