From Old and Young Manuscripts (1935–1981)
Reuven Rubin, portrait of the poet.
And it will be at the end of days,
And thus it will happen: the son of man
Will bring to his hungry mouth
Neither bread nor meat,
Neither fig nor honey;
He will savor only a word or two
And be sated.
1978
Fragment
Oh, Lithuania, homeland mine,[70] serpent's bite in my heart,
Storks, vaulted in my memory over your black forests,
Like Kabbalistic signs, gild the rims
Where your fir trees rustle on Viliya's banks.
The body-burners are your fire witnesses.[71]
The body-burners. Day and night, in my bones, ring
Their swinging chains, pleading: Give us meaning.
With the clatter of the chains, my words are
Welded in the copper labyrinths of a dream,
Have no reality — to dream, to rise.
I am an incarnation of the body-burners of Ponar.
My bread is baked of ash. Every loaf — a face.
The sun their memorial candle, and no one knows it.
And when I walk the streets of Jerusalem in the rain,
In its diamond mirror, I see their souls
In wound-colors: Living brother, give us meaning.
And I pray to the sheet of paper: Be cold as rock.
Reveal a miracle. Let my searing syllables
Straying over you, not turn you to ash.
1950
Recognition
I thank and I praise the scorpion
For giving me drunken pain.
Before poppies light up and go on
And the mist is blooming again.
In his sting to my very quick,
In the drug of his pinpoint needle —
The eternal secret, the trick
That only pain can unriddle.
In the beginning was the scorpion.
He sought for life a word.
Before poppies light up and go on
Over all the atoms he is lord.
1978
Subforest Laughter
I know a forest: a madhouse for trees,
Locked in the forest. The watchman keeps the key.
The trees rip the birds off their heads. Rustle to the silence.
In a storm, they drink the wine of its lightning.
Through the corridors, green as copper-eve,
Stroll the days. One by one, they come, in white
Robes. Through the same green aisles
They flee with searing stains on the white.
Every tree a prison in a prison. Only roots
Streaming out with mossy, subforest laughter,
Groping and clutching bones and skulls,
Drilling into them the madness of life.
1978
A Bunch of Grapes
I
In love,
I drowned in grass.
At thirty,
I drowned in tears.
Now I drown in the desert
And am ever thirsty.
II
I saw in the desert a bunch of grapes,
A bunch of grapes with a drunken gaze.
And I must rush,
Run for miles,
To come back
To yesteryear's day.
III
You are too near for me to go away.
Unless I doff the linen dream,
Unless I go far from myself
Till the last abyss.
The sages say:
Not just the earth is of sea and of rock and is round
As a tear.
I shall come to the gray-haired mirror
And smite it so uneternally long
With the bone of my skull,
Till a Voice-of-Thin-Silence rises
In the void behind the glass:
You are too near for me to go away.
1978
Yosl Bergner, illustration to "Winedrops."
Winedrops
I
A string of birds seeks in the sun strewn seeds of sound
To sing silence to a dreamer in the grass.
II
Fewer words.
Fewer, fewer drops.
Soon, the goblet will run out
Along with the wine.
1978
Elegy
The dead live in another domain.
I am their time. I say: It rains. And comes the rain.
I say: Snow. And violin strings of snow fall.
They love to hear my poems and I read them all.
I say: There is no death. I hear a roar:
Death is our life, is life no more?
I say: We are one, let us not split in two.
They love to hear me read my poems, and I do.
1978
Yosl Bergner, illustration to "Divine Comedy."
Divine Comedy
When in another incarnation
You seat me in your garden spheres,
Do not create me young again
And fervent, but replete with years.
And later, do not drive me out
Full of God's mockery and wrath.
I want to taste both from the tree
Of life and from the tree of death.
I want to taste the real tree
Of poisoned pain in your dark shade —
In vise of silence I endure,
For in your image am I made.
A serpent then may flick its tongue —
One snake, a second and a third —
Just so that night with its gray hair
Should not impose its rule, unheard.
Just so that to the gushing spring
The mouths of my thin fingers flung —
Till every drop inside my body,
Instead of growing old, grows young.
If I live long enough to see
My childhood, in my youth advance —
My cat will wash her gentle paws
And in his joy my dog will dance.
1979
Wooden Steps
For Freydke
I don't remember faces. People erased. Of many stairs,
Only the creak of wooden steps without a bannister.
The wooden steps up to my garret, six by six,
Where under the roof sparrows come to parties
And drink and cry and laugh till daybreak.
I don't remember faces. Their heirs are ruins.
The creak of wooden steps up to my garret winces:
Ah, the poet Leyzer Volf,[72] not the creak of my princes …
Who taught a shadow to play in the nights?
A flash inscribing in the clouds sky-notes.
Fiddle cases of wooden steps. Inside — the musicians,
Their music drew us off to different regions.
Up to our neck in silences: catastrophe —
But I caught Sirius in a single strophe.
The garret went off to Ponar. The faces too. Of many stares,
I remember the creak of wooden steps without a bannister.
1979
Legend
When Rokhl Sutzkever,[73] the gentle painter of our
Young Vilna and young life,
From wounded ghetto alleys
Walked barefoot
To the whirlpool — the gate,
From the knapsack on her girlish back,
The twins — two brushes — poking out.
Earlier, she dipped them in her own two eyes.
I saw: the brushes see,
Swimming to the gate, they say farewell
To falling leaves, balconies, steps, dolls,
To their models in the sinking city.
In a moment, the brush-gold of our painter
Will be a legend.
I whispered: Rokhl, Rokhl, did you take
In your knapsack
Canvas too and tubes of paint?
Or will you paint with a single color: red?
No matter what, I will
Come breathless to your exhibit
Personally
And see for myself,
Admire a horrible still life — —
1979
Needleshine[74]
And thus it was: When I returned
After the Liberation
To my hiding place
Between God and Satan —
Through the thin tin vaulting
I once pierced with a nail,
Fell the same oblique shine,
The same heavenly needle of light,
In whose grace I needled letters
Into the silver parchment of my body
For all eternity.
Let me unravel the secret:
Liberated, when I returned
To my hiding place —
In the same needleshine I saw,
Quivering in the ray of dust,
A familiar figure. I could swear:
I it was. And am. And shall remain,
Strung on a string of dust
With the same needle.
1978
A Prayer
For years, a prayer sails in my veins,
And its waves my strophes bend:
Dear God, let us exchange our memories —
I will recall the beginning, you will remember the end.
1978
Small Elegy on the Extinction and Resurrection of a Single Word
Of two lips, a he and a she, you were born, Wonder.
Springtime entered to rise in you.
Separated from the two, you conducted
My blood symphony.
Oh, word of mine, unique
As a one with burnt out zeroes,
Sensitive as a magnet's needle
To the North Star.
Of two lips, a he and a she, seeing and invisible.
I do not know whose dream embodied you, whose
Tearburst ardently extinguished you.
Without you, I was a cinder, I was
Without body-or-tongue.
And you, unique, my I, you heard
Under dust and shards
My breath.
You came to life, immortal as death.
1979
The Great Silence
In the Sinai Desert, on a cloud of granite
Sculpted by the Genesis-night,
Hewn of black flame facing the Red Sea,
I saw the Great Silence.
The Great Silence
Sifts the secrets of the night.
Unmoving, its thin flour falls on my brows.
Silently, whispering,
I ask the Great Silence,
If I could I would ask more silently:
How many stars did you count
Since your beginning, since your hovering steady
Over the Genesis-night facing the Red Sea?
And the Great Silence replies:
When I shall count it all —
From nothing to the very first thing,
Then, son of man, I shall tell you first.
1979
To Be Able to Say: I
You must possess the courage of an other,
From another time,
To be able to say: I.
To say: I
You must place on your lips
A black coal, whitehot,
And burn out all other words.
To say: I
You must bow
As when uttering the Unspeakable Name.
1978