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LIRIT 3 - CONTEMPORARY POETRY
2004
Professor Ada Aharoni:
Founder and Editor of LIRIT: POETRY ISRAEL
CONTEMPORARY
POEMS FROM ISRAEL
Contents
1. Ada Aharoni: BIRTH
PANGS OF PEACE
2 .Adelina Klein: TORRENT
OF BOOKS
3. Amos Meller: LITTLE
PRAYER TO A PRAYER FOR SHUBERT
4. Balfour Hakak: A
SCROLL OF LINEAGE
5. Chelly Abraham-Eitan:
SEPARATION
6. Daniel Cohen-Sagi:
LOOK
7. Edith Covensky: A
COSMOPOLITAN POEM
8. Edna Mittwoch-Meller:
SHALOM (Peace)
9. Esther Eisen: I READ,
I SAID
10. Esther Vitkon: THE
GRACE OF BEAUTY
11. Hanita halevy: THE
LAND OF ISRAEL IS LIVING HERE
12. Herzl Hakak: MY
MOTHER'S MAGIC
13. Moshe Ganan:
WHENEVER
14. Oded Mizrachi: A
WOUNDED HOLY ANIMAL
15. Orna Rav-Hon: THE
TOUCH OF STARS
16. Rina Levinsohn:
HEBREW
17. Miriam Neiger: EXILE
18. Moshe D.
Shafrir-Stillman: HAGAR
19.Pinchas Sadeh:
EGYPTIAN NIGHT
20. Puah Shalev-Toren:
IN MEMORIAM YEHUDA AMICHAI
21. Puah Shalev-Toren: I
COUNT THE KISSES
22. Sara Ditza Kourtchy:
SIGHT SEEKING
23. Sharon Chaplik:
CELEBRATION OF LIFE
24. Yaakov Barzilai: AT
LOW LOFTINESS
25. Yosef Ozer: COKE AND
JEANS
26. Schulamith Chava Halevy: SOON
27. Dorit Weisman:
A SNAIL
28. Daniel Cohen-Sagi:
LOOK
29. Ruth Netzer:
BERGER
1.
BIRTH PANGS OF PEACE
Dedicated
to the Memory of Yitzhak Rabin
You were right Rabin -
innocent people fed with scrap-bones of lies,
like cruel jungle animals
fight against the vision of peace
as if it were a war
You were right Rabin -
and we, the mavericks of discussions
riding blind sacred cows,
forget with the swiftness of the wind
that time flows only in one direction.
You were right Rabin -
when pregnant mothers
are killed
when praying men
are murdered -
frontiers melt.
In this cursed, cursed war
in which you fell -
a new phoenix is born
breath-taking in its beauty,
lovingly nursed
by millions of tears
and songs of children
Newborn Shalom will suddenly
spread its multi-colored wings
in the heart of Middle Eastern
golden sunshine and will still fly.
2. CELEBRATION OF LIFE
And we have much to celebrate
The fluid movements that
Transform ones body into
Motion that has no boundaries
The tremor that creeps into ones voice
When speaking of longings that surf
Across a rainbow of feelings
The artist's fingers
That capture a myriad of colors
Letting imagination soar
And daylight splashes its light
Over a world in constant motion
A drop of dew that for a moment
Locks in a prism of color
Night creeps in with a peeping moon
Infant slice of silver light
Soon it will swallow the stars
And a full moon it will be
Balfour Hakak
Translation from the Hebrew by Schulamith Chava Halevy
3. A SCROLL OF LINEAGE NEW VERSION
My grandfather
received from
his father a parchment
a scroll of
lineage
and his father
received from his
and his father received from his
father from
father
back to the
elders of the
great Assembly
But when my
father departed in his immaculate gown
when he
ascended to his great ancestral land
the scroll
blew into sighs
the scroll
blew in the wind
names aflame
letters afly
Ever since
lost still in the
tempestuous storm
I seek after
my trampled scroll
in the light
of day
in the
twilight of sorcery
Indeed, I must
create
starting now
a scroll of
lineage
a new scroll
One that
begins with me.
Translation
by Schulamith C. Halevy
4. My Mother's
Magic
She has
nothing but her life.
Seeds of light
embedded between rows
Singular
enchantment
Ours are lives
she knew to shape
as if from
flour. As though everything was
ground
grain by grain
in the
millstone
While all the
women sat upon stone steps
toying with
their fans
glancing in
any direction
they beheld a
reticent glow upon her forehead
My mother
kneaded her life, and ours
never losing
sight nor sorrow of the maiden field
Sara Ditza Kourtchy:
5. SIGHT SEEKING
O God, Give me that sight again:
my slim poetic mother caressing
my son`s hair --
a gentle hand soothing soft
black curls, her lips on his forehead,
murmuring kisses, to mingle with prayers, all
soaring up, to the tree top
where a pair of doves flutter
flatter
each other
songs of love
How blue was the sky,
How green the leaves,
How peaceful the sea,
How sweet the music.
Give me back that sight, again and again,
to erase the noises of gunfire,
the sounds of
bombs,
to replace the cries, the blood, the corpses,
to evade sorrow smells,
dismembered souls.
Give me that early sight again,
to seek sanity, to obtain mercy,
launching up new, better, prayers
to soar higher, over tree tops, and doves,
to the fierce upper heaven.
Moshe D. Shafrir-Stillman:
Translated by: Ruth Tanenbaum
6. Hagar (a ballad)
And Abraham rose up early in the morning and took
bread and a bottle of water and gave it unto
Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child and sent away; and she
departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-Sheba.(Genesis, chapter 21, verse 14)
He rose up early in the morning
And took bread
And a bottle of water
And gave it unto Hagar,
Putting it on her shoulder.
As he sent her away
He dared not look her in the eye;
When he placed the child in her arms,
His face was pale with shame
As he thus sent them from their home.
She went on her way in the morning,
She went with the boy who was crying,
She went out there in the sun,
She went south to the wilderness
Wandering in the desert of Beer-Sheba,
The dry uncultivated waste land.
And when they finished the bread
And the water from the goatskin,
Then under one of the shrubs
She cast her own child.
And as is written in the Bible,
She went and sat down over against him
A good way off, As it were a bow shot,
With no strength left
She sat there and wept
For she said, let
Me not see my childs death.
And there was only the blazing sun
With a quiet crying of the child,
So that only God could hear
And salvage a dying lad.
Yosef Ozer:
Translated by Mark Elliott Shapiro
7. COKE AND JEANS
The same week Jews read in the synagogue
The section in the Bible about
Sarah's banishment of Hagar and Ishmael,
Seven-year-old Ali Jawarish was wounded -
By a plastic-tipped bullet
That penetrated straight through to his brain.
Ali Jawarish became a vegetable.
He lay dying in an Israeli hospital for two whole days
And the Angel of Death who arrived
Did not show the well to Ali's mother
The same week Jews read in the synagogue
The section in the Bible about
The binding of Isaac,
Ali Jawarish was divided into several parts -
One 15-year-old boy received Ali's liver and lungs.
The boy's mother told the media
That her son sat up in bed and asked for
A Coke and a pair of jeans.
Ali's father said that they would donate his son's organs
To a Jew.
Yesterday a Jewish soldier was divided up
Among a number of Arabs
This insane poem is begging to be written
Perhaps in this way, slowly and delicately,
We will carry out a population transfer:
Palestinians will receive the organs of Jews
And Jews the organs of Palestinians
And our Matriarch Sarah
And their Matriarch Hagar
Will be oh so pleased with their lot
And we will all drink Cokes and wear jeans.
Adelina Klein:
Translated by: Esther Cameron
8. TORRENT OF BOOKS
Books. Films. Flowing
Free butterflies
Lengthen and shorten
Their pages. Ink. Iinkwell. Quills.
The smell of paper.
Letters
A woman in love with love
A particular smell of perfume in the air.
A fan in open space.
No more coolness
No more warmth
No more curiosity
In man. In books.
They dismiss Utopian thinking
Because existing reality
In which the morning coffee is getting cold
Hes no naive use for it.
Before the slicing of toast
Before the green olives
Before the cheese spiced
With summer savory and salt,
In Tel Aviv, are
Antique storefronts, trees and songs
The main thing?!
Who's reading? Who's Iistening ?
Litte`rateurs
Even the building shaped like ships
Memorialize a future
Drawn up from the past
A spiritual museum like
A menorah -
Illumining the soul.
9. WHENEVER
Whenever you lie in the midst of Absolute Unity
Neither desiring, nor having an end to attain,
Doing your daily duty, beyond which there lie only the dim fields of shadow,
The fog slowly rising, filling the crevices,
Neither the past having now any immediate importance,
Pressing its devices on your consciousness,
Nor the future scintillating before your inner eyes with fears depressing, or
promises,
Ho, holy equivalence,
All the antinomies, contradictions tearing your brain apart asleep,
Gathered back into their primeval shell, whence
They once commenced, broke forth, to wreak havoc in the world
Or to make it very interesting,
Oh, holy Nirvana
Wholly content
Neither absorbing nor
Very radiant,
Neither curious nor
Wishing to teach
Now you lie asleep
On the bosom of the world.
Orna Rav-Hon :
10. THE TOUCH OF STARS
Why is this wind telling me
these soothing words.
Just moments before
I could not abide my body consumed by fire
and it controls me now like the thorn-bush
drawing from within my hands
the touch of stars.
Pinchas Sadeh:
Translated by: Moshe Ganan
11. EGYPTIAN NIGHT
The Maid
On the sandy path
So slowly - my heart is sinking -
I have born the basket
With my little sibling.
Water, reeds around;
I lay here shivering;
Afar now I kneel
Dusk sets on the river.
The Waters
From the springs in hills unknown
Abyssinian abysses
Shaded by brown date-palms
And carobs like molasses
By the yellow dunes
Dry and dead reed and grass
Under the silver moon
Endless we flow and pass.
The Maid
Ho you holy waters
Please flow still and deep.
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.
Please do not wake him
Flow by slow and mute
Carry him tenderly
He's a boy so cute.
The Waters
In most deadly silence
Like angels in the ether
Amidst mourning shores
We pass and travel.
Not like you, the maiden
Kneeling on the shore,
Doomed forever
To live and suffer sore.
The Maid
Now the night has come.
Darkness reigns and quiet.
The sky is calm.
The earth is silent.
Ho you holy water
Please flow still and deep
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.
12. SEPARATION
Both of us are flowing now
In parallel channels
The curved sentences
That we curved as a river
In painful conversations
Those are getting short
We talk
Using senseless sentences
With double line spacing
In between the words.
13. THE LAND OF ISRAEL IS LIVING HERE
the desert always does something to me,
i wake up in the desert.
more running than walking
the land of israel is living here.
i don't want to miss any step
as the way to know the age op the ground
is to walk pace by pace
like abraham our father, moses our teacher
like a boy, like a girl
that grew up and ran on the land.
a passing bird
knows
doesn't know
the land of israel is living here.
Puah Shalev-Toren:
Translated by: Shulamit S. Nardi
14. IN MEMORIAM YEHUDA AMICHAI
You saw yourself as an impoverished prophet
But you were in fact a wealthy poet.
Rich in imagery
Rich in dreams
Rich in wars
Rich in memories
As though you had lived a thousand years;
Rich in love of all times.
A wealth poet
With a travel ticket to hidden worlds,
To reach the gate of mercy,
The heart of God's smile
The heart of men's hearts.
One and all came to your treasury
And borrowed word coins,
For sorrow and joy
For farewell and forgetting
For question and answer
For serenity and hope
And for greater love.
Wealthy poet,
You came into the world
Wrapped in scrapes of words,
And you leave in a garment
You wove of verse.
Making your way
To the window of God,
To the Eden of words.
Puah Shalev-Toren:
15. I COUNT THE KISSES
I count the kisses
That you kissed my hand,
Like the rich man does
When he counts the jewels in his palm.
And I wrap them up
In my heart
Like a miser wrapping
The coins of his money
I amuse myself with them
Like a baby playing
With sun spots
On the wall .
And I think of them
Like a child playing about
Slowly reciting
A poems words .
Rina Levinsohn:
Translated by: A.A
16. HEBREW
Perhaps not my mother's tongue
However my people's tongue.
It is a bone of myself,
It is my blood.
Miriam Neiger:
Translated by: Anthony Rudolf
17. EXILE
I am a poet exiled to fields of color.
Seeds words in the furrow of the brush
Sprout rhymed lines upon soft canvases
Fertilize them with pigments,
Make pictures grow.
I am a painter exiled from fields of color.
I assemble words fallen from heaven
like rebel angels looking for salvation;
I arrange urgent letters on restless sheets,
build spectacles there.
I am a woman exiled from districts of love
to a land of rain colors, to sign-filled spaces.
I am doomed to collect in a charity box
scraps of spirit from reality's back rooms
to satisfy my soul
18. I READ, I SAID
I read: "a house"
I said: a house with open windows, thin curtains, a door.
And it was standing,
Belonging to me,
Without mortgage, without me having to run
To work every morning
Hanging a key around the neck of my child -
And it was standing,
Belonging to me.
Its vision was hanging,
And the key.
A key to where?
I wrote: "my Child"
I wrote: "my Man"
I wrote: "Love"
19. THE GRACE OF BEAUTY
The street is quiet, the house is still
Suddenly in the dark of the cypress against my window
Beauty burst
On the line of hills marking the sky
With evening paleness
Through the yet naked vine
In the heart of the cypress
Grace of God in orange and red burned
And was not done.
By force of pleasure
All wrongs forgotten
All offences in sand buried
20. LITTLE PRAYER TO A PRAYER FOR SHUBERT
Feeling the edges of your endless nights,
another line composed at dawn.
Eternal light moving your body while praying,
the musical instruments and those carrying
sounds of your own,
like those who water flower-beds,
but for you, their stalk would wither,
their tune would melt away.
Within the six prayers of the Mass in G,
staying with you, I watched you, so heavenly , divine,
your eyes were cosed up by a prayer for mankind.
The conductors baton stopped all motion and bowed down,
there is no room for words after the sounds.
Edna Mittwoch-Meller:
Translated by: Gila Uriel
21. SHALOM (Peace)
The words have lost their power
Broken and bleeding they lie tight
Besides the bodies at roadsides.
No longer can they move or excite
The heart of a mother, a man, or a child.
Even the solemn, trying music
And the protesting hymns
Sounding through each shuttered window and door
Through the silence of the bereaved
Can console no more.
The tears changed form and hue,
Through the town center they silently flow
A mighty current river
Upon melting winter snow.
Yaakov Barzilai:
Translated by: Elisheva Gal
22. AT LOW LOFTINESS
Have you ever tried
living without love?
It’s like asking
winged birds
not to soar.
I am
a grounded bird.
Edith Covensky:
Translated by: Edward and Susann Codish
23. A COSMOPOLITAN POEM
Soon the impressionists will begin
to paint sunrises from the shadows.
(Derek Walcott)
My poem is cosmopolitan
acting between memory and wilting
with matter of such an invention
and most optimistic illusions.
What are the interpretations of words
the ways of the poem in the survival of love
and elusive time leading astray
marked across the beauty of the sea.
What are the arabesques of the sun gliding on water
with a sign of the dark
funny in such a sketch
much more useful than the night.
What is the tablet of the poem
with an eruption measuring the day
burning yellowing consumed within me
with wind bursting might.
Daniel Cohen-Sagi:
Translated by: Jenny Brudo
24. LOOK
Look how the white candle
laughs at our burning souls,
look but don't see
the dead birds
dancing with the sheets of your body,
and look at me
as though I am not among the living
you passed through the street
as other people
black flakes of paper
on your white hat.
Oded Mizrachi:
Translated by: Esther Cameron
25. A WOUNDED HOLY ANIMAL
Like a beggar stretched out on the street
I courted the eyes of others.
I pleaded for coins of appreciation
From those sunk in the soil of the earth.
I replaced the Sovereign of the Universe
With His hurrying image.
I begged for mercy from wretches
Like myself, condemned to life.
26. SOON
Soon my child
we will tape the windows over again
stand in endless lines for gas-mask fittings
be sent home empty handed
told to come back
Soon
I will spend the nights awake
awaiting the siren; watch for clues
on foreign stations
Soon
we'll sit and pose for the camera
in our masks. I will ask you to wear my rain slicker
you will pretend to not want to but will
Instead of going to school you will come to
work with me
Soon
we will be telling those jokes again
trying to diffuse the anxiety permeating the
sealed room like
poison gas.
27. A SNAIL
This morning I stood and looked at a snail
In the moist dark soil
Below the bedroom window
Its muscular slimy body is painfully exposed
Gray and self assured and solid it moves forwards
Not knowing how fragile
Its two antennas are up in the air forwards and diagonally
As far forward as possible, bright knobs at their ends
And it crawls on the soil
Amongst giant geranium trunks
And one red petal
Which has fallen off
And when the snail comes across an obstacle,
An outstretched geranium branch,
It climbs over
And sometimes -
Its body suddenly squeezes itself into
Its armored shell
As if it were checking something
Or stopping to ponder
Then the antennas emerge out of the shell again
And it goes on
On its eternal voyage
Certain, quiet and wet.
I'm standing there, watching
In my mind ambulances tearing the air
And a mother cries, my daughter is dead,
My daughter is dead
And what do I do, but count
The children at home in their beds
And on the television war is peace
And assassinations are the answer to terror
And only that snail
That snail alone brings my breath back to me
And maybe it, it is actually watching me
In its quiet, slow manner
Beyond times
Daniel Cohen-Sagi:
Translated by: Jenny Brudo
28. LOOK
Look how the white candle
laughs at our burning souls,
look but don't see
the dead birds
dancing with the sheets of your body,
and look at me
as though I am not among the living
you passed through the street
as other people
black flakes of paper
on your white hat
Ruth Netzer:
Translated by: Nahum Steigman
29. BERGER Copyright:
Ada Aharoni - Haifa, 2004
You are visitor number
A strong man, Mr. Berger, and stubborn
At seventy-three still changes my damaged screens,
cleans out my gutters, and is up on the roof fixing tiles.
A strong man, Mr. Berger, at seventy-three
his eyes are as blue and bright as the boy's of thirteen
on the transport with his parents to the camps.
Then he didn't want to live
but now he'll suddenly give a laugh
and a slap of his thigh
(eyes as blue and bright as a holiday)
"Ach, what a life it was in those days ! "
and he climbs back up on the roof.
Rights remain with the authors.
since July, 2000.