Written in Vilna Ghetto (1941–1943)
They Search
A search all around. Any peep is a knife.
The bloodhounds — steps of a wrathful God.
But who protected us both with a fog?
Do you see? It envelops us … You nod …
Do you see the palace of gray, where all colors
Like suffocated babies sink in the gray.
We lie there in tandem like naked sheaves:
The fog and us two — all the rest swam away.
But in the no-one-ness, my mouth clinging tight
To red glints. Only now can I see how they part:
Out of the gray, your lips are abloom!
But who has created this purple art?
The fog has created them! See their red tips
Sever themselves from bodies and mind.
They float. For this is the nature of lips:
To love only others, drunken and blind.
Vilna Ghetto, 1941
A Pack of Music
I
Over a pile of steaming horse dung,
I warm my icy hands.
I warm my hands and regret:
Not enough have I known, have I listened
To the greatness of smallness.
Sometimes,
The warm breath of a pile of dung
May become a poem, a thing of beauty.
II
With such moments
In a forest of snow
You have to wrestle
Worse than a dying man
Fighting his microbes.
If you win —
They will become your own,
Revealing
The meaning of struggle,
The birth of fates
Locked up in snow.
But if you lose the furious fencing —
Your own breath
Will freeze you to death.
III
Alone. Pure, frozen calm.
Under the stillness —
My naked body.
Just two yards of ground are mine —
Here I lie, covered by the moon.
I sharpen my ears
For a voice of a friend,
A voice of a friend!
But like my own echo coming back from afar —
Music of wolves
In a shimmering semicircle.
Is this the only faithful thing
I have left:
Music of wolves —
The last faithful thing
Frozen howls over forest snow?
Let it be!
Relentless as steel,
It closes in on me,
A pack of music!
Come close, my wolves,
My dearest wolves!
Let us be friends, let us prowl together
On hostile man, on the devilish whirl.
Pack of music —
Conquer the world!
Vilna, Zakret Forest, December 1941
Execution
Digging a pit as one must, as they say.
I seek in the earth a solace today.
A thrust and a cut — and a worm gives a start:
It trembles below me, breaking my heart.
My spade cuts him through — and a miracle, see:
The worm divided — becomes two, becomes three.
I'm cutting again: they are four, they are five —
Was it I who created all of those lives?
Then the sun breaks through my darkest mood
And new hope makes me proud and firm:
If a worm will never succumb to the cut,
Can you say you are less than a worm?
May 22, 1942
Am I Guilty
— Am I guilty, must I pay for guilt?
And to whom: the present or the past?
— No difference, you fool, there is a guilt,
You may be a mistake — but pay you must!
— Was I created of my own free will?
Think about it, please, and spare your scorn!
— Nothing to think about, don't ask what, when,
And do not hang your faith on any thorn.
— Am I and Fate a one or strangers two?
If two, reveal — I'll beat him to the ground!
— Decide yourself. In the flash of your pain
You see him in the stormtroopers around.
May 1942
A Day in the Hands of the Stormtroopers[16]
I
Don't hit. My limbs do not hurt anymore.
These limbs are not mine, like an hour that's passed.
An unseen hand pulls me out to a world
Where there is no death,
None.
I take off my body like a cover of dust.
Like a road wound up on a wheel, I spin in time.
But the pit is not covered with shuddering panes —
It's really a shame,
A shame.
II
Cranberries torn by the storm.
Bunches of beads on snapped twigs —
My body in lime.
Is this I? Where is my I?
Every limb will try
To touch, to feel itself:
Here.
Here.
Here.
Pieces of quicksilver
That won't come together.
Reality has no grip on by body.
No pain — like knifecuts on nails.
Dream is truer —
Drumming in my head:
Madness.
Madness.
And stains before my eyes, just stains
Like radiating hearts of carrots.
How did I get here?
Fled.
When? From whom?
How do you flee? Who gives the order?
The arrow sees sharper than the eagle,
Though he is ruler, she — a slave.
Hush. Live it backward, recall.
No, forget.
No, no, recall again:
Escaped.
You from death or death from you?
No matter.
The mocking man just played:
Instead of you, he shot the dog.
Now the dog howls in your head:
Madness.
Madness.
III
Dawn,
As if I were born anew:
The stains — gone.
One white stain of lime,
Dissolved in water,
Seethes and sees:
I lie steeped in it,
Half-drowned,
And melted rubies emanate from me,
Drip, run away
In lines like poems, plant
A smiling rosy sunset in the lime.
I grow fond of the limepit.
I lie and contemplate:
"I shall not cease to be amazed —
Till night, till late —
At the loveliest sunset
That I myself create!"
Vilna Ghetto, May 1942
Three Roses
From the Poem "Three Roses"
I
Slivered sunset — shards of hot hail.
Time on my tongue lost its mind.
I run and fall like a stone
Into an abyss.
Falling, I pray to oblivion:
Splatter my memory with acid.
Later, I lie in the depth of an abyss,
On delicate,
Rosy-soft serpents
Of a dream.
The serpents suck out my memory,
Extinguish the smells,
Deepen the colors.
The knife of darkness cuts open a vein.
Time seeps out of my skull.
But my mind cannot
Free itself of itself:
Under the ash of what once was life
Splinters of God's image
Still glowing —
A vision of my mother
In her flowery shawl
And eyes: two candles in the storm.
II
You were hiding, hiding, hiding your tracks.
A wall split and swallowed you up in its cracks,
When Satan's mignons, like worms,
Sought your breath.
Sought — not found, and drunk, moved away,
Suddenly: who's breathing the wall, looks for prey?
A Jew … Mogen Dovid[18] … Is it you, my child,
Or perhaps the savior?
S. Bak, illustration to Sutzkever's ghetto poems.
Wrong, wrong, the Jew has betrayed.
He drags by the hair, you are stunned and afraid.
Your hair turns white,
Covered with snow.
III
An untouchable scale
Swings back and forth:
On one pan the world topsy-turvy
And I, crucified on a gate,
On the other — a teardrop.
The world swarming with me,
Has no idea what man is.
But the teardrop that would not be split
Can tell you of death.
It weighs deeper.
IV
Who runs through the dead city with flapping wings
Like a chicken with its throat slit,
That tore out
Of the slaughterer's stained hands?
Night enfolds him
In black smoke,
Unrecognizable.
But my heart,
Sensing what cannot be sensed,
Beats in time to that running.
It runs faster, faster,
Beyond all measure.
Five times,
A hundred times
As fast as him.
It hovers to the gates of the ghetto
Marked by a plague with screaming letters:
Achtung!
Plague.
Off Limits to Non-Jews.
And there, it grabs the figure by the collar
Like a thief
And in the light of broken eye-white panes,
It sees:
A man as big as a thimble
And bigger than everybody else,
Windy naked.
His skin of blue, wavy glass,
Transparent,
Reveals (it's scary to believe):
All the inside, the hidden:
A horde of senses fettered in chains
Like criminals
And over them a purple whip.
And every single sense
Bites the other's throat:
— It's your fault, yours.
And screams in Yiddish …
The right eye is gold-blue,
A monument to a childhood
In the grave of a diamond.
The left eye, seen everything,
A cloud empty of lightning,
And on the cloud, a cataract —
A yellow Mogen Dovid.
V
Either because my Golem-head wants to break through the earth,
Or because the soles of my feet long to see the stars —
I am drawn to fly off the roof with the sharpness of a sword
And, out of vengeance, to destroy myself.
VI
No, your words are too gracious, too maternal.
Consolation won't heal when sin is defiled.
If I'm too weak to stab your murderer —
On myself I must bring a vengeance wild.
Payment must come. I, your offspring,
Of my own fate I must be the judge. I wail:
As a broken bone wants to flee from its pain,
My soul wants to break out of its jail.
And maybe this reckoning is abysmally false
And this is the punishment: myself to torment?
And maybe your love has remained, keeping me
From leaping into freedom, forever pent?
VII
I open a window to let in the frost,
Let the moon hang me in the noose of her shine.
My budding gets warmer as I freeze,
Farther from home and closer to you.
VIII
You had swum across the river —
You are free
And your life-color
Went off with the waves.
On the other shore
There is no memory.
You don't even recall
How you got there,
For you left death
On this side.
And on this side am I
With our dying in my brain,
Suckling me, feeding,
Like your milk in the beginning.
But I cannot touch you, Mama.
For you are a mist
Spun out of tears,
And I — a tangle
Of sliced-up words
(Just one word: vengeance
Still gasping).
I wait for the river
To pull off, stream away
Under my footsteps,
And my life-color —
To catch up with yours.
IX
I shall take a spade and walk off to seek you,
I shall plow up fields, dig up graves.
I shall ask the grass, I shall taste the thorns
And feel your shadow on my arms.
And if I cannot reach out to you,
I shall dig into words and spade into sound.
Until I shall free the beautiful roses
Of the dark land where they went down.
Vilna Ghetto, October 1942
My Mother
I
Friday evening in an attic, cooing.
You flicker at the moonshine in a Siddur. [19]
The points of your yellow patch are praying,
Like human limbs, they flicker and endure.
The pupils of your eyes drip with moon.
Mama-drops illuminate my faith with love.
Your prayer brings to me the smell of warm challah, [20]
With fervent prayer you feed the doves.
In each of your wrinkles my life is concealed.
I hear you cough. You tremble, trying
To hide it, lest anyone hear — for there in a corner,
Covered with earth, my bones are lying.
Your hand on my forehead is dozing: be calm,
Just a day or two, salvation — is near.
Your other hand on my ear is resting:
The voice of the murder I must not hear.
II
You won't fool me: I know you are dead.
Though you live in my dream. Why do they char
Your heart, three roses in scarlet red?
Don't cover up.
I know who they are!
Don't cover up, Mama, you can't fool your child!
How can they bloom here, three roses unheard?
I see three bullets, purple and wild:
The first, the second, the third.
III
Bring on the cymbals,
Bring joy to a laughter, mute the scream of a crow.
Through fields
They chased my naked Mama,
Her body a ray in the mirrors of snow.
And she, as to redemption,
Runs somewhere, faster, fast.
And through her frozen tear, where the sun glows
Imprisoned forever, she sees me at last.
And amid her confession
She sends a blessing to her son.
The rifles pound.
She falls like a dove on the throne of the sun.
IV
Where was I,
When cymbals crashed
And they dragged you to the scaffold?
— in a dog's kennel; I buried my bones,
With a dog's joy that curses itself,
On lips — a leech,
In ear — a spider,
I peeped through a crack to see:
Under the moon — mirror to the night,
The wind plays with pearls of snow.
Snow-orchestra,
Mysterious swirl
Against the moon —
Whence such splendor?
Each tiny pearl
Of snow played
With its own shadow and the image
Gave me such pleasure
That I burst into barking— — —
V
For me, in the night, three bullets shine.
I run, from shadows dark to set them loose.
I reach a yellow gate with watching sign:
"Achtung! Plague. Off limits to non-Jews!"
With my teeth, I bite through the stone
In light of slivered eyewhite panes, I falter:
The houses — with no souls. I am alone.
The streets — a burnt-out altar.
And I fear to watch your window pane.
Breathing with your dying, every stair.
With my mouth, I seek your smallest grain
Of dust. I feel you in each tremor of the air.
I drop to a threshold of stone, gray-white:
— Mama, here I am, I'm returning!
And the bullets, painful and bright,
In the turmoil of my conscience, burning.
VI
I seek the dear four walls
Where you once breathed.
The stairs dizzying under me
Like a whirlpool moiling.
I touch the doorknob and tug
The door to your life,
It seems: A little bird cries
In the cage of my fingers.
I walk into the hollow room
Where your dream darkens —
Barely flickering, the oil lamp
You have lit.
On the table, a glass of tea
You didn't sip to the end,
Fingers still throbbing
On its silver rim.
Begging for mercy, the tongue of light
In the flickering lamp —
I pour into the lamp my blood
So it won't stop shining.
VII
Instead of you, I find a coat of many colors.
I press it to my heart, bashful and raw.
The holes of your shirt become my days
And the seam of your shirt in my heart like a saw.
I rip the clothes off my body and creep
Into your naked shirt as into myself.
No longer a shirt — your shining skin,
Your cold, your everlasting death.
VIII
You are talking to me
So palpably bright:
— Don't, my child,
It's a sin, it's a sin!
This is our parting —
Accept it as right.
If you are still here,
Then I exist too,
As the pit in a plum
Bears in it the tree
And the nest and the bird
And the chirp and the coo.
Vilna Ghetto, October 1942
From a Lost Poem
Mama,
I'm sick.
My soul is a leper.
And maybe more:
Yellow madness.
The balm of your kiss —
Too holy
To breath
Into my wounded abyss.
But if it is true
that you love me as ever,
Next to God —
My last plea and commandment:
— Strangle me!
Strangle me with your Mama fingers
That played
On my willow cradle.
It will mean:
Your love is stronger than death.
It will mean:
You trusted me with your love.
And I will go back
To before-my-becoming
And be and not be
Like a star
In water.
A Wagon of Shoes
The wheels they drag and drag on,
What do they bring, and whose?
They bring along a wagon
Filled with throbbing shoes.
The wagon like a khupa [21]
In evening glow, enchants:
The shoes piled up and heaped up,
Like people in a dance.
A holiday, a wedding?
As dazzling as a ball!
The shoes — familiar, spreading,
I recognize them all.
The heels tap with no malice:
Where do they pull us in?
From ancient Vilna alleys,
They drive us to Berlin.
I must not ask you whose,
My heart, it skips a beat:
Tell me the truth, oh, shoes,
Where disappeared the feet?
The feet of pumps so shoddy,
With buttondrops like dew —
Where is the little body?
Where is the woman too?
All children's shoes — but where
Are all the children's feet?
Why does the bride not wear
Her shoes so bright and neat?
'Mid clogs and children's sandals,
My Mama's shoes I see!
On Sabbath, like the candles,
She'd put them on in glee.
The heels tap with no malice:
Where do they pull us in?
From ancient Vilna alleys,
They drive us to Berlin.
Vilna Ghetto, January 1, 1943
My every breath is a curse.
Every moment I am more an orphan.
I myself create my orphanhood
With fingers, I shudder to see them
Even in dark of night.
Once, through a cobblestone ghetto street
Clattered a wagon of shoes, still warm from recent feet,
A terrifying
Gift from the exterminators…
And among them, I recognized
My Mama's twisted shoe
With blood-stained lips on its gaping mouth.
— Mama, I run after them, Mama,
Let me be a hostage to your love,
Let me fall on my knees and kiss
The dust on your holy throbbing shoe
And put it on, a tfillin on my head,
When I call out your name!
But then all shoes, woven in my tears,
Looked the same as Mama's.
My stretched-out arm dropped back
As when you want to catch a dream.
Ever since that hour, my mind is a twisted shoe.
And as once upon a time to God, I wail to it
My sick prayer and wait
For new torments.
This poem too is but a howl,
A fever ripped out of its alien body.
No one to listen.
I am alone.
Alone with my thirty years.
In their pit they rot —
Those who once were called
Papa.
Mama.
Child.
Vilna Ghetto, July 30, 1943
On the Anniversary of the Ghetto Theater
I
… We walled ourselves in
And live apart.
From your freedom outside, do not smile at us,
Do not pity —
For us, even death can blossom into wonder.
How can we sit together
With you in one place?
Your hatred for us will poison you like mice,
Our wounds — love will heal.
As long as the outside is yours —
Ours is the ghetto, here we will lie
And from God's heart, we will knead a redeemer
And polish a melody …
II
Perform, Jewish actors, in tatters and in walls,
Where life shrivels like hair that caught fire,
When red drops of your loved ones are seething on stones,
And the alleys convulse like half-slaughtered hens
And cannot arise, fly away, flee…
Perform, friends! Let us think: it's a shtetl of yore,
They celebrate a wedding at an autumn graveyard
With Jewish singing and dancing light,
In a joyous circle around the bride and groom!
Perform! From your mouth, let Yiddish sound,
Pure and clean as the ghost of a slaughtered child,
Harsh and hoarse as the voice of our rifle and gunpowder,
Performing tomorrow
Over the rooftops…
And you, melancholy fiddlers,
Who stole out at night
Into the lurking outside,
Shuffling past houses,
Evading patrols,
Creeping to your ruined old home
And digging up your fiddles
Planted before your march into the ghetto —
You play too!
Pluck out the deepest tones!
Let them carry above your bones
And stray far, where a Jew still shimmers…
Where a heart still trembles, waiting for good tidings.
Let them carry over fields, over front lines,
Pure and clean as the ghost of a slaughtered child,
Harsh and hoarse as the voice of our rifle and gunpowder,
Performing tomorrow
Over the rooftops…
Vilna Ghetto, December 31, 1942
How?
How and with what will you fill
Your goblet on the day of Liberation?
In your joy, are you ready to feel
The dark scream of your past
Where skulls of days congeal
In a bottomless pit?
You will look for a key to fit
Your jammed locks.
Like bread you will bite the streets
And think: better the past.
And time will drill you quietly
Like a cricket caught in a fist.
And your memory will be like
An old buried city.
Your eternal gaze will crawl
Like a mole, like a mole —
Vilna Ghetto, February 14, 1943
Grains of Wheat
Caves, gape open,
Split open under my ax!
Before the bullet hits me —
I bring you gifts in sacks.
Old, blue pages,
Purple traces on silver hair,
Words on parchment, created
Through thousands of years in despair.
As if protecting a baby
I run, bearing Jewish words,
I grope in every courtyard:
The spirit won't be murdered by the hordes.
I reach my arm into the bonfire
And am happy: I got it, bravo!
Mine are Amsterdam, Worms,
Livorno, Madrid, and YIVO.[22]
How tormented am I by a page
Carried off by the smoke and winds!
Hidden poems come and choke me:
— Hide us in your labyrinth!
And I dig and plant manuscripts,
And if by despair I am beat,
My mind recalls: Egypt,
A tale about grains of wheat.
And I tell the tale to the stars:
Once, a king at the Nile
Built a pyramid — to rule
After his death, in style.
Let them pour into my golden coffin,
Thus an order he hurled,
Grains of wheat — a memory
For this, the earthly world.
For nine thousand years have suns
Changed in the desert their gait,
Until the grains in the pyramid
Were found after endless wait.
Nine thousand years have passed!
But when the grains were sown —
They blossomed in sunny stalks
Row after row, full grown.
— — — — — — — — — —
Perhaps these words will endure,
And live to see the light loom —
And in the destined hour
Will unexpectedly bloom?
And like the primeval grain
That turned into a stalk —
The words will nourish,
The words will belong
To the people, in its eternal walk.
Vilna Ghetto, March 1943
A Moment
A moment fell down like a star,
I caught it in my teeth, for keeping.
And when they chopped open its pit,
It sprayed on me a kingdom of weeping.
Each drop mirrored back to me
Another dream, another sense:
Here — a road winged with thousand arms.
Here — a bridge to a dream ascends.
Here — my grandfather, a snake at his head.
Here — my child smashed on a stone.
I also found there one free drop
In which I closed myself alone.
Vilna Ghetto, April 7, 1943
Yonia Fain, illustration.
Moses
Who is the woman fluttering toward me,
At her breast a baby with no name?
She hovers through to the Viliya shore
And at her breast the child — a flickering flame.
She dashes to the shore, into the river,
Digs deep into the rushing torrent's hiss.
She sets the baby on a floe of ice
And she — starts sinking, sinking in abyss.
How far is the Viliya from the Nile?
Same water flows, days other days beget.
The horror of eternity makes it a habit:
Return again — so man should not forget.
For one last time she reaches out her fingers
And pulls the sunset down. The waves, they race
Over her head, now stormier and lighter,
And on the shore — just I remain, a trace.
The ice floe bears a present to the spring:
A dreamy baby swimming to the sea.
And I accompany it to the moon
And bless it: A new Moses will you be!
Vilna Ghetto, April 15, 1943
Teacher Mira[23]
With patches on our bodies, striped and parching,
They chase us in the ghetto, streets are marching,
Our buildings say farewell eternally,
Stone faces walk with us at each decree.
Old people wearing tfillin like black crowns,
A calf walks with a village Jew in tow,
A woman drags a person by the nails,
Another pulls a bunch of wood on rails.
Among them walks a woman, Teacher Mira.
A child is in her arms — a golden lyre.
She clasps another child by his frail hand,
The students walk around her — trusting band.
And as they get to Jew Street, there's a gate,
The wood still warm and raw, they huddle, wait.
And like a sluice for torrents of a flood,
It opens up and swallows in its blood.
They chase us over ruins, no bread, no light,
Bread is a book, a pencil shines so bright.
She gathers all her children on the floor,
Teacher Mira goes on teaching as before.
She reads Sholem Aleichem's [24] tale aloud,
A sparkle in their eyes, they laugh so proud.
She ties blue ribbons in the girls' braids
And counts her treasures: hundred thirty heads.
And Teacher Mira, like the sun, at dawn
Awakes, waits for her children to go on.
They come. She counts. Oh, better not to count!
For overnight, some twenty were cut down.
Her skin, a windowpane in stains of dusk,
Mira must not reveal the darkness thus.
She bites her lip, of courage she will tell:
About Hirsh Lekert,[25] how he fought and fell.
And overnight, gray covered all the town,
And Teacher Mira's hair, her silver crown.
She seeks in cellars for her mother blind,
And seventeen more children she can't find.
When sun dried up the blood, with branches green
She trimmed the orphaned room, so neat and clean:
— Gershteyn [26] the teacher came and we shall sing,
Over the walls, our children's choir will ring.
They sing: "Not far is spring." But in the street,
Axes and bayonets smash, crush, and beat.
They drag from cellars, hidings, but the choir
Sings on "Not far is spring," sings higher, higher.
They are but sixty, with no sister, mother,
Now Teacher Mira is one and the other.
A holiday approaches, little doves,
We shall prepare a play, a play she loves.
The fête — and only forty children left.
But each in a white shirt, each child bereft.
The stage is fresh, a garden in the sun,
A river you can swim in, you can run.
When Peretz's [27] third gift took all the bows,
The peril has cut down the rickety house.
People were caught by snatchers! [28] Save us, Heaven!
Of a hundred thirty, Mira remains with seven.
Till axes split her mind, she on her knees,
A flower, and her children — buzzing bees.
Gray is the flower, and the time is awesome.
Tomorrow in the dew, again she'll blossom.
Vilna Ghetto, May 10, 1943
The Fortress
I
The fortress is old,
So gloomily old,
Its dust — crumbled stars.
The grandfathers molded its hidden mold
Of clay soaked in tears.
Half a milennium, they built and built —
Oh, distant grandfathers,
Patient and great!
Bones kneaded into the walls
Stand guard —
Witnesses of fate.
Hear their voice:
Recover
Your trace,
Ignite
The steel,
Unite
The race.
A wall against fear and a wall to endure,
In the fortress, your own body immure!
II
At night the fortress is dark,
Only the glow of hate.
The street lost its tongue —
Galloping steps of fate.
S. Bak, illustration to Sutzkever's ghetto poems.
But deep under iron and clay
Layers are moved in the night:
In secret, they drill and they build,
Through channels, traces of light.
A second fortress they dig,
In stormy rage — a mine.
And wicks feverish, ready
To ignite for the battle a sign.
Vilna Ghetto, July 14, 1943
On My Thirtieth Birthday
At thirty, my father's heart burst
While playing
Rebbe Levi Yitzhok's melody [29] on a violin at night.
The fiddle trembled on his shoulder like a child
And its tongue —
A shining magnet —
Attracted
The wide world to the shadowy hut
Where I, a seven-year-old dreamer,
Wound around
My father's knees.
It was in luminous Siberia.[30]
Was.
A sunstain
Or the hot tongue
Of a freezing wolf —
Licked the snow on the windowpane
And could not melt it all. —
Its light
Illuminated the staccato sounds
Of the violin
And striped my wet eye with sparks.
Suddenly, my pale father
Clutched his heart,
Twitched,
Shook
With outstretched arm,
And on my small hands
His body fell
Along with the violin,
Like a heavy branch
Falling on a light wave
And the wave bears it away.
Above us, hovered a melody.
Below, on the floor,
My father gasping, breathless.
And either I made it up
Or my words are true:
Lying thus,
Bound to a cold silence forever,
His lips entrusted me:
— That's how, my child,
Try out on your hands the weight of life,
So you get used to
Bearing it later.
That moment
The poet in me was born.
I sensed:
Somewhere in my body a seed lies waiting,
Carrying in its entrails
A special mission.
It seemed: I became the lord
Of forests,
Men,
Things,
And all I see
Is my embodied wish.
Since then it follows me,
Father's lucid will:
— That's how, my child,
Try out on your hands the weight of life,
So you get used to
Bearing it later.
Now
I have myself run up to my father's age.
Run up —
And no road back
And none ahead.
And when I see my face
In a mirror,
From its waves flows up
My distant father.
And maybe I am he, and my years
Are just a link
From his departed life?
The same face as his,
Evoking snow on windowpanes;
The same heart,
Prepared to burst,
And like my father,
I have a red violin:
See, I tear my veins
And play on them my melody!
But no one is there
To wind around my knees
And weigh my life,
To carry on
Like a wind
My yearning cloud
To a clear goal —
There
Where all words come to rest,
Where days meet
Which never met before.
Like a stone, I clutch in my fist
My thirty years
And hurl them in the abyss
Of a cold mirror.
Vilna Ghetto, August 1943
The Lead Plates of the Rom Printers [31]
Like fingers stretched out through the bars in the night
To catch the free light of the air that is shed —
We sneak in the dark to grab up, as in spite,
The Rom printing plates, with old wisdom inbred.
We dreamers now have to be soldiers and fight
And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.
S. Bak, illustration to Sutzkever's ghetto poems.
And now, once again we broke open the seal
Of a strangely familiar, a timeless dark cave.
And armored in shadows, with candles concealed,
We poured out the letters — in lead lines engraved.
Thus did, in the Temple, our forefathers wield
The golden menorahs, poured in oil that was saved.
Liquid lead brightly shining in bullets so fine,
Ancient thoughts — in the letters that melted hot.
A line from Babylonia, from Poland a line,
Boiled, flooded together, in the foundry pot.
Jewish valor, hidden in word and in sign,
Must now explode the whole world with a shot!
And he who saw Jewish youth in their prime
Clutching the weapons in ghetto halls —
He saw the last struggle of Yerushalayim, [32]
The heroic fall of those granite walls;
Took in the words, poured in lead, out of time,
And heard in his heart: their ancient voice calls.
Vilna Ghetto, September 12, 1943