Showing Results 111 - 120 of 142
Aged woolen women, like old siddurim—moldy, mossy
Bound in coarse canvas;
Pointless bellies dangling after them like empty sacks,
Dried-out breasts, like horseradish roots, swaying back and forth.…
I am a stranger.
Since no one dares approach me
I would be girded with towers
That wear their steep and stone-gray caps
Aloft in clouds.
The brazen key you will not find
That locks the musty…
The rain cleaned off the steep facade of houses;
I write upon the white and stony sheet
And feel how my tired hand so softly rouses
From love poems that always, sweetly, were a cheat.
I wake in the…
“Even if you kill us, we will leave traces,” insists the poet. Poems such as this one affirm the power of humanity even in the midst of atrocities committed by neighbors.
Silence, and a starry night
Frost crackling, fine as sand.
Remember how I taught you
To hold a gun in your hand?
In fur jacket and beret,
Clutching a hand grenade,
A girl whose skin is velvet
Ambus…
And now Blimele, dear child,
Stop—stop playing now.
No time for that.
We can be called at any minute
To leave our poor home
—A lonely boat on an island of sand—
And be hurled into the midst
Of a…
Dense crowds proceed at dawn
Through Theresienstadt’s still empty streets
Five abreast curving around corners into squares.
The beast checks if anybody has stumbled.
Today God’s chosen people are…
All those things whose names I hushed
in secret, I meet in the night’s abyss.
I face the dark. Alert, remembering. Silently,
again I’ll let you in—my friends, my beloved dead.
And here you are as…
The dreadful angel in me is invisible
today, his screeching almost still.
You startle at its whisper. Is it
someone come to pay a visit
or a grasshopper tapping at the sill?
It’s he. Oh, he is…
As you die there in agony, brother,
Don’t be calling your comrades in vain.
Let me warm my hands on your body,
Make good use of the blood from your veins.
Stop crying, stop groaning, don’t be a…