◊

Fragments from Menke’s Yiddish Epic Brénendik Shtetl (‘Burning Town’), books I (1938), II (1938) and III (1941)

{not to be confused with Menke’s later Burning Village (N.Y. 1972) written by the poet in English}

◊

and

Poems from the Yiddish books: Grandmother Mona Takes the Floor (1939); The Simple Dream (1947); Midday (1954); Safad (1979); and Menke Sonnets (1993)

All poems on this page are in the English translations of Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, from the volume Menke: The Complete Yiddish Poems of Menke Katz (The Smith, N.Y. 2005)

◊

Yiddish — My Song, Khaikhe — My Gold

The Flower “May” in Mikháleshik and Svintsyán

May in Mikháleshik

◊

Part of the Mikháleshik Yizkor Book project

Menke Katz Mikháleshik poems originally in English

See also: Menke Katz resource page

Menke’s books, essays, autobiography

Biography, 9 Yiddish books, 9 English books

◊

Fragments from Menke’s 3 vol. Yiddish epic, Brénendik Shtétl (Burning Town) vol. I (1938), vol. II (1938) and vol. III (1941). From vol. I:

◊

In Mikháleshik, a spasm of silence.
The huts huddle in danger.
The town gluts itself on calm
As on a last supper —
Calm screams the coming of blizzards.
◊
Night lies in pieces, sawed by crickets.
Virgins cower in attics,
Shuffle the spiderweb with scared steps.
All around —
The Viliya with gushing water
Peels the bark off fresh-chopped trees.
◊
The ferry raft is moored, the guard has gone.
The midnight study vigil is restless
Over the nearby graveyard they hear
The wind saying Kaddish through the grass.
◊
Pig Street lit up with early spring.
Twigs grew blue with lilac blooms.
Mikháleshik holds its breath
And listens —
Suspect breezes whispering:
They go! They come! Who? Where?
The Germans, huh? The Germans what?
Sha-sha,
Hush!
◊
In the studyhouse, in starry loneliness —
The light of torn holy books.
The tabby cat, dozing on the fence,
Wakes with a start,
Claws ready to pounce on Death.
◊
From somewhere, a rider
Gallops by through the fear;
One hand reins in the nimble horse,
The other — loads lead.
◊
Bent over his obedient horse,
Vigilant to bursting, the rider sneaks by:
He is all — ear, he is all — eye.
◊
Time
Condemned the town to death.
One day of fire consumed the sleep of generations.
The garland of huts — crumbled in slivers.
In the church, crucified Jesus burned.
Wringing hands gleamed facing the fires:
“Save us, Sa—ve—us!
Our God has forgotten the church.”
Horses whinnied in flaming stables.
◊
In ash of Torah Scrolls,
Jehovah — a sitting ember.
◊
Cannons hurled the dawn up to the sky.
Mountains rolled down to valleys.
On the earth, displaced roofs point:
Here was a street.
◊
Mud puddles streaked with blood, point:
Here were people.
Sooty window shards recall:
The sun was seen through them.
◊
In lairs of the Forest of Zabortsh,
Children and mothers and stars in hiding.
Death grazes on fat wolves —
If someone screams to the wilderness
He will be taken care of by the wolves.
◊
But somewhere, a single hut, saved by a miracle —
And Dveyrke dreams there in Eltshik’s lap.
Louder than cannons, they listen to the softest murmur:
“Our oath is sacred,
Till death shall we love.”
◊
At the earthworks of a cannon trench,
Aaron-Velvel’s Khashke is giving birth.
All the huts fled
And left her alone with all that destruction —
Smells of corpses sown in the wind.
— — — — — — — — — — —
◊
Q — u — i — e — t.
Can she still hope for day?
Night is eternal
And the world — as if someone took it away.
She bites her voices into her own flesh —
No one must hear her lament.
◊
The child remained — for wounded light
The mother — for grass and for stars.
◊
At dawn after the battle, people found
Mikháleshik — ground through a fire mill.
Of man and house — blood and smoke remained.
And Meyshke the Crook sits shiva for them all —
Just he and Pig Street, shielded by the Finger of God.
◊
At dawn after the battle, Badonna found
Her dead sister’s arms — clutching a baby boy.
As if she wouldn’t let the sorceress, the sun,
Tempt her child into such a world.
◊
Badonna brought her sister to the grave,
And to her children, she brought a new baby brother.
◊
When even Death grew weary
In the cannon fencing,
Bleeding rye rustled in Koomsa Field —
Flickering ashes glowed
Like a rainbow after a storm.
When even Death grew weary
In the cannon fencing,
For three days and three nights, the Germans
Marched through the demolished town
With rifles, songs and Russian prisoners.
◊
And Jews —
For three days and three nights they thought:
Like Jacob’s found son
The boy shall be called: Joseph.
And women babbled like water,
Each one heard a rumor:
The boy is a reincarnation fled from hell.
◊
For two lunatic years, the war
Spun the town in bloody spiderweb.
Man and horse and crow in a whirlpool —
The Viliya flooded and swallowed.
✻
◊
◊
Extinguished October night —
Crying desolation of Lithuania —
Rain pours clots of clouds
Soaks the dead in the field,
And mourns over the living in the trenches.
Through scorched ruins of Vilna Street
Lost Russians drag their feet,
Death hidden in their rifles.
Man and wind and scream of rain.
Mikháleshik howls — a wolf with stabbed limbs.
Dveyrke hides from danger
in Eltshik’s strong arms:
“My only one, my love,
Strength rises from your body,
From the light of your chestnut forelock
And you are filled with sad songs
Like your silenced mandolin.”
✻
◊
◊
As they adorned themselves with the most beautiful words,
As they have no words anymore
To tell of their love —
Eltshik and Dveyrke play the card game Flirt
And lose all unhappiness in their happiness:
◊
“You, my faithful, my golden joy,
What I want to confide, what I want to tell you —
My own breath should not hear:
If a bullet takes you away from me,
I shall not cry, I shall not lament,
But in my mourning dress that I will rend
Under the moon — I shall let down my long hair
And in a shadow dance
Lightly I will make my way to the Viliya.
Above me — the Mikháleshik stars,
And upon my head,
The most beautiful garland — of buttercups.
Thus will I come to you in heaven
With my death — to heal your death.
Upon our graves the grasses will kiss.”
✻
◊
◊
Mikháleshik still devoured by venomous calm.
Its sleep — a giant serpent,
Coiling:
Around condemned roofs,
Around charred corners.
◊
Toys that kill wake Yeyske from sleep:
“M-mama, hear,
M-ma-ma, look.”
“Who? Where”
“A c-c-c-cockroach.”
✻
◊
◊
Dawn shows Mikháleshik
Congealed in golden blood.
Deaf Michaska bows to the idol.
Badonna senses
In the Koomsa under the snow —
The sap of her springs flows.
Yeyske — a tiny frozen sun,
Lets the hunger suck his thin limbs.
Eltshik, clenched, watches
The day dawn for the last time on Pig Street:
The thatch roofs in a prayer against the fire,
The scared chimneys — throats for the slaughter.
✻
◊
◊
Mikháleshik is abandoned by man and world.
The Koomsa is sown
With pieces from the faces of heroes.
The air wafts
The choking of dying mouths,
Warming the frosty earth with their last breath,
◊
Holding in their teeth, like a curse, their humanity.
Through the frosty evening, the dead soldiers shine.
The field is dark with the ashes of carcasses in the flickering light.
The evening shows: how many colors
Of robbed wines will shimmer in the ashes.
The wind shows:
Tall, gloomy grasses will rustle here
When every mother will take into her dream
Her son’s vanished face.
◊
At night, in the Forest of Podverántz —
When Amy shut her weary eyes a moment,
She felt
How pleasantly they sleep under the snow:
The mushrooms, berries, grasses,
And above them
The fallen, steeped in moon.
She guided her hand through their frosty locks,
And left it there, along with eternity.
◊
In her last moments she saw:
The good angel holds her good deeds —
The angel sent by Todres through Badonna’s cow.
And she saw: the good angel
Washes her locks with moon soap,
Then turns the world —
And all evil men are choked.
✻
◊
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Of Mikháleshik, Svintsyánke and Svintsyán
With songs of beggars, Gypsies and birds —
Never saw any marzipan.
◊
The juiciest orchards
Never got drunk on vines.
The bean, the onion, and the oat
Had no reason to praise God.
◊
Mendele’s mare sank in the mire,
Dragging the drowning wheels,
Limping with a flogged hide —
Through passages cleared in the forest,
Through sparse fields.
She was greeted
Here and there,
By a lone flying bat —
And by the hungry wilderness
Spotted with poison mushrooms.
✻
◊
◊
The Sabbath calm was sliced by a sword.
Tempests swept away the nights,
And there is no night.
Conflagrations burned the days,
And there is no day.
The sun is dark on cinder walls.
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Of Svintsyán, Mikháleshik and Svintsyánke,
Sown not with rye, not potatoes,
But with nettles, carcasses and worms —
A sick sun
Dries the dead guts
Of children, soldiers, horses.
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Shimmering with pitch and sulfur,
Is not worth a head of cabbage,
A loaf of rye bread.
✻
◊
◊
Quiet.
On the roofs, hours sit and bear a crushed dawn.
Chaim-Meir of Svir
Shuffles —
Around the twisted walls of the Old Studyhouse,
Thinking,
Sadly-sadly:
God lives in holy words of Torah Scrolls.
◊
Chaim-Meir of Svir cheers God up
And goes all around — a shadow-circle,
Dancing with his beggar’s stick.
The fingertips jump pious and quiet —
Not to waken evil spirits.
◊
Chaim-Meir of Svir cheers God up
Claps for him a You-You tune with his skeleton hands:
You, You, You-You-You-You—
In Svir You, in Svintsyán You,
In Mikháleshik You, in Klushán You,
You, You, You-You-You-You.
✻
◊
◊
“The winter, with all its fury,
Assaulted Mikháleshik,
Only Queen Noodleswirl
Knows if the frost will fall.
◊
“Without Bloomke and Boome
Two huts wait, freezing wounds.
The walls bend more crooked,
With wrinkles of whitewash,
Smothered by generations.
◊
“On top of straw roofs
Snow towers grow —
Both angels and demons
Made out of silver.
◊
“Here life struggles
As before the last confession.
The bakery is rich
With smoke and soot.
◊
“The chimney coughs through a wall,
Mirrored in fires of frost.
You can reach out and touch
The wings of the Angel of Death.
✻
◊
◊
Badonna lifts Eltshik by his stiff hands,
Menke by a foot, Bloomke by a foot,
And Yeyske — by the blond head,
As always, forward —
Through night and cold and forest:
“We m-m-m-must f-f-flee with Elinke f-f-f-from hell,
And he will l-l-l-live,
He has to l-l-l-live.”
◊
From afar the guard watches
Four dead thieves
Hurrying through the forest of the night
To Mikháleshik! to Mikháleshik!
In their moonlight hands,
The stolen corpse sways — a living trough.
◊
Fear becomes cold and cold becomes fear,
And the guard himself is both.
✻
◊
◊
Crazy Amy — over a snowed-in grave,
Hears her Todres speak as through a hurdygurdy:
“Dear Amy, my shining heaven,
Do not say farewell to the poorhouse and graveyard,
You are destined to die in Pig Street.”
◊
Crazy Amy — over a snowed in grave,
Hears her Todres — a weeping from the Otherworld:
“Dear Amy,
Do not leave me alone in my grave.”
◊
So Amy took a clod of dirt from his grave,
And hit every door with the Sabbath-eve stick:
“Good people,
Let me take on your evil lot,
Let it enter my every aching limb.
May you not be afraid of rifle, hunger and battle.
My Todres will bless you all,
He will be our father,
He’ll intervene for us!
He’ll save us!”
◊
Amy, with a lament as from the Other World,
Rushed through the town:
“To flee Mikháleshik
Is to buy hell.
Mikháleshik is holy.
He who deserves the happiness of my Todres —
Death will reward him,
And he who is not worthy of his beloved name —
Let him get used to life as to leprosy.”
✻
◊
◊
Mikháleshik freezes with the slain:
Under the ice of the Viliya,
At the rotting fence of the graveyard.
Crazy Amy
Queen of the dead and of Todres’s grave,
Alone through blasted fields,
Plods — an invented Golem,
And tears her garment in mourning for everyone,
Even if God cursed him to be gentile,
Three times a hundred rips
Mourn on her tattered dress.
Crazy Amy, stooped over everyone’s disaster,
Laments —
Chicks devoured by frost,
Laments —
People yet to be shot.
✻
◊
◊
Mikháleshik, with love, with rags and tears,
Went out into the “Great Outside World.”
Longing eyes carry the poorhouse with them:
From battlefield to battlefield.
The Viliya itself leaks away in bad dreams.
◊
Every battlefield
Was once a tiny gray village.
Here, a heart burned on every stone.
Here, a crow burned at the prey —
And with burning wings fanned the fires.
✻
◊
◊
Mikháleshik is abandoned by man and world.
The Koomsa is sown
With pieces from the faces of heroes.
The air wafts
The choking of dying mouths,
Warming the frosty earth with their last breath,
Holding in their teeth, like a curse, their humanity.
◊
Through the frosty evening, the dead soldiers shine.
The field is dark with the ashes of carcasses in the flickering light.
The evening shows: how many colors
Of robbed wines will shimmer in the ashes.
The wind shows:
Tall, gloomy grasses will rustle here
When every mother will take into her dream
Her son’s vanished face.
✻
◊

Fragments from Menke’s 3 vol. Yiddish epic, Brénendik Shtétl (Burning Town) vols. 1 and 2 (1938), and vol. 3 (1941). From vol. 2:

◊
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Of Mikháleshik, Svintsyánke and Svintsyán
With songs of beggars, Gypsies and birds —
Never saw any marzipan.
◊
The juiciest orchards
Never got drunk on vines.
The bean, the onion, and the oat
Had no reason to praise God.
◊
Mendele’s mare sank in the mire,
Dragging the drowning wheels,
Limping with a flogged hide —
Through passages cleared in the forest,
Through sparse fields.
She was greeted
Here and there,
By a lone flying bat —
And by the hungry wilderness
Spotted with poison mushrooms.
✻
◊
◊
The Sabbath calm was sliced by a sword.
Tempests swept away the nights,
And there is no night.
Conflagrations burned the days,
And there is no day.
The sun is dark on cinder walls.
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Of Svintsyán, Mikháleshik and Svintsyánke,
Sown not with rye, not potatoes,
But with nettles, carcasses and worms —
A sick sun
Dries the dead guts
Of children, soldiers, horses.
◊
My poor Lithuanian earth —
Shimmering with pitch and sulfur,
Is not worth a head of cabbage,
A loaf of rye bread.
✻
◊
◊
Quiet.
On the roofs, hours sit and bear a crushed dawn.
Chaim-Meir of Svir
Shuffles —
Around the twisted walls of the Old Studyhouse,
Thinking,
Sadly-sadly:
God lives in holy words of Torah Scrolls.
◊
Chaim-Meir of Svir cheers God up
And goes all around — a shadow-circle,
Dancing with his beggar’s stick.
The fingertips jump pious and quiet —
Not to waken evil spirits.
◊
Chaim-Meir of Svir cheers God up
Claps for him a You-You tune with his skeleton hands:
You, You, You-You-You-You—
In Svir You, in Svintsyán You,
In Mikháleshik You, in Klushán You,
You, You, You-You-You-You.
✻
◊
◊
“The winter, with all its fury,
Assaulted Mikháleshik,
Only Queen Noodleswirl
Knows if the frost will fall.
◊
“Without Bloomke and Boome
Two huts wait, freezing wounds.
The walls bend more crooked,
With wrinkles of whitewash,
Smothered by generations.
◊
“On top of straw roofs
Snow towers grow —
Both angels and demons
Made out of silver.
◊
“Here life struggles
As before the last confession.
The bakery is rich
With smoke and soot.
◊
“The chimney coughs through a wall,
Mirrored in fires of frost.
You can reach out and touch
The wings of the Angel of Death.
✻
◊
◊
Badonna lifts Eltshik by his stiff hands,
Menke by a foot, Bloomke by a foot,
And Yeyske — by the blond head,
As always, forward —
Through night and cold and forest:
“We m-m-m-must f-f-flee with Elinke f-f-f-from hell,
And he will l-l-l-live,
He has to l-l-l-live.”
◊
From afar the guard watches
Four dead thieves
Hurrying through the forest of the night
To Mikháleshik! to Mikháleshik!
In their moonlight hands,
The stolen corpse sways — a living trough.
◊
Fear becomes cold and cold becomes fear,
And the guard himself is both.
◊
◊

Fragments from Menke’s 3 vol. Yiddish epic, Brénendik Shtétl (Burning Town) vols. 1 and 2 (1938), and vol. 3 (1941). From vol. 3 (‘Mikháleshik in America’):

◊

Heershe-Dovid

Once upon a time
I saw
Simple magic:
Yes, my father was a mirage.
◊
His hands
So restless:
Each hand
Filled with luckless years, did not know its fingers.
◊
Reality — a magician —
O so much dream
In hard reality.
My father revealed the magic of the seven wonders:
◊
Yes, I saw with my own eyes
Og, King of Bashan
With a heart like a tower,
Leading a host of suns through the night,
While walls of light and steel rose from earth —
◊
Until all the heavens roared:
Truly there is such a land
With no fear — no Svintsyán
No Mikháleshik — no bombs. There is such a land:
America! A! Me! Ri! Ca!
◊
Once upon a time
I saw
Simple magic:
Yes, my father was a mirage —
◊
His hands like swords
His heart on a lightning bolt —
Running
Through victories, a legendary rider.
◊
A delicate today
Caressed the sick yesterday
And I suddenly heard my father’s voice
Nearby, coming from a distant, conjured world.
✻
◊
◊
On the windowpanes, Elinke’s years sparkle
Like disintegrated stars.
The July night, a bright sorceress,
Carries away yesterday and today on her wings.
Badonna stays in the bright morning.
◊
Heershe-Dovid breaks his work-worn fingernails in sorrow.
He strolls from corner to corner, from today to the past:
A distant Badonna brightens next to him.
Klezmer play a doodella for the bride.
Happy luck dances out of the drum.
The violin wailing every sorrow
Of Svintsyán, Mikháleshik and Svir,
So there won’t be sorrow anymore.
✻
◊
◊
And the children in the happy school
Yearned more than learned —
Yearned with a gnawing heart for hungry Svintsyán,
Yearned with the fear of a howling Mikháleshik
When emperors shrank on their thrones,
When God himself hid in attic spider webs,
Hid from the cannons of murder.
And the children in the happy school had
Their eyes full — of Mikháleshik and tears.
◊
Yeyske built a house deep in thought:
Of chips and pebbles and dreams.
A painted dawn blues though the mossy walls,
God Himself on a weary camel rides in a painting,
And His heart aches for His people Israel.
On the hinges, abandoned doors rust.
Over the straw roof, instead of a chimney
A lonely lantern is smoking.
◊
In the lantern, a candle, a paraffin eye
Is blinking the mire of grief,
That used to lead to Meyshe-Benyomin’s cheider.
Here yearning is a closed gate to an eager world.
Here yearning is a little window gilded by a penny candle.
Here yearning is the last sunset of Mikháleshik.
◊
And facing the ferment of light and squares,
Yeyske told so many stories:
Stories of parks, birds and rabbits —
How giants, humans and stars
Met a legend.
Stories of an imprisoned lot
Set free by friendly death:
Of a hanged man who escaped from the noise,
Of an ice prison that chose spring for its guardian.◊
◊
Through the scream of stone, the shimmer of insolent steel,
Menke looks for the end of the walls, as if he created them.
The broad avenues dwindle into narrow paths
At the sight of the loving past.
Through the magic of longing
He sees a tower turns to a heap of pebbles.
Out of all alien street screams, one single word
Remains dear to his lips:
Mikháleshik, O faraway frightened flicker!
◊
The fires of a thousand Broadways will not obstruct you,
And the heroes, the towers, cannot vanquish your weak huts
Nor vanquish my childhood that endures,
Clutching at you with the nails of poverty.
My grandfather Aaron-Velvel, your richest man,
Famous all the way from Svintsyán to Svir,
Had a thin rooster, a proud dream, and a couple of sad goats.
Mikháleshik, you beautiful grandmother’s tale,
The “Dandy in a Bowler” will never like you.
In a dream, even eternity dwindles to a little corner,
Facing you.
✻
◊
◊
Dusk.
Hard work brought home a used up day.
Berke’s day — hanging on scaffold ropes.
As many moments — so many dangers.
Death is an empty place with luring vises.
Wholeheartedly entrusting himself to the rigging,
He sees Mikháleshik floating in America
Above an abyss.
O scaffold, please do not cheat me!
◊
A flower smiles in his jaunty lapel.
He cherishes the wisdom of hard work.
A resounding well spring whispers secrets to him.
Today he chased the dark from squinting walls.
With brush and colors he hurled rays today,
And now a divine light plays in his hands,
As if he painted the night with sun.
✻
◊
◊
The prepared table, as if standing in a singing orchard.
Every evening, Heershe-Dovid is king, Badonna queen.
All around in a garland — the pretty children:
Berke, Menke, Bloomke, and the New Elinke
Who doesn’t understand anything about the dream of stories,
And Mikháleshik is strange to him — wonder of wonders.
◊
When the supper hour departs with a thrill of thrills,
And your heart enjoys the sated fullness,
Yeysinke’s empty place gnaws
And father misses Yeyske singing zmíres.
The saddest word is sounded in silence
On the lips of Badonna.

◊

Poems from Grandmother Mona Takes the Floor (1938):

I am Grandmother The Past

Your rage — a fire giant,
Enough to burn away the sadness of a little fly,
If only your hatred could scratch out the eye of a foe,
If only your flame could
Heat a frozen hut.
Your word bursts like a deluge of light —
Enough to flood the nights,
Enough to polish generations of shoes with its beams.
But I get dark-dark from so much light
And so I get sad-sad from so much happiness.
All your joy can scare me
As in a storybook about once-once —
In Mikháleshik at night in the cemetery,
A Golem with a voice turned clear,
With a face of a ghost
And dressed in shrouds
Used to do a hopka to wake the dead.
◊
Because you are sad as a thousand Coney Island suns
Your joy is sadder than all sadness.
Because the poet’s sadness can be more joyful than all joy
My days found so much sadness,
As darkness can shine in a true poem,
There is also darkness in my happiness.
✻
◊
◊
I am Grandmother Mikháleshik.
At my mother’s breast, I sucked
The fiery fear of Burning Village.
I am Grandmother Want, bent over a women’s prayer book.
◊
I am Grandmother Want:
The heart of a blue infant in dazzling frost.
My fear is —
Heershe-Leyb Tarshish hanging in a noose of tefillin.
My fear is —
A mocked tallis on a dog’s tail
Before the ruined Ark of a defiled prayer house
He goes out in a ghostly barking.
◊
I am Grandmother — The Past,
Only God can speak from so far.
If my days are rust, total rust,
Time has bloodied the rust.
◊
I am dead, dead for generations.
But through my grandchildren, I am the deadliest rage
Against Haman and Torquemada.
I am Night, night for generations.
But wearing the wounds of my people,
I am all red flag,
I am the dawning day
That will banish ghost and dark and want.
✻
◊
◊
There is a kind of red, my child,
The violated blood of my grandchildren—
Of such a red and of a night of graves,
The bad guy spins a banner,
His banner a bloody whip,
His banner a noose in the bad guy’s hand.
With his banner he chokes my dead neck.
◊
O Haman of Ahasuerus’s days is Haman in Mikháleshik’s days.
In his noble top hat, in his snappy tuxedo,
He is the slaughterer of the secular slaughterhouse.
For so many generations, he tears my shrouds,
And with tatters of the holy cloth
He closes the sun away from my people.
The gleam that he brings is the gleam of guillotines —
O Haman’s light!
And the axe shines
Over my martyred grandchildren,
And the axe shines
Over the last limbs of your dead Grandmother Mona.
✻
◊
◊
So what,
If unlike him,
I asked the time
Of the good sun and the proud rooster,
If just like him, I wrote with three dots?
So what,
If with a pale red as of fading poppy blooms,
He can shrivel over the joy of tomorrow’s roads,
That unlike me, he can tell
Grandmother’s tale of the prankster, the bear
In the bathhouse of Pig Street,
Where on the hottest floor,
With Urke’s cobbler’s awl,
They extracted ten laughing little humans
From the bear’s belly,
So what,
That with an whole tempest, he can buzz out half a breeze,
That unlike me,
He can dance in a sunny circle with dirty-faced grandchildren,
That unlike me,
He can love the wounded depths of his race.
◊
In infant dawns,
My muddy longing is for Mikháleshik and Svintsyán —
The full blue of a springtime dream.
In infant dawns,
My past is a child:
The cool dew on overheated fields.
Through the steel song of brand-new cities,
My past is the zest of every builder’s hand,
The impetus of a new train,
Taking off for the first time.
✻
◊
◊
Your rage — a fire giant,
Enough to burn away the sadness of a little fly,
If only your hatred could scratch out the eye of a foe,
If only your flame could
Heat a frozen hut.
Your word bursts like a deluge of light —
Enough to flood the nights,
Enough to polish generations of shoes with its beams.
But I get dark-dark from so much light
And I get sad-sad from so much happiness
All your joy can scare me
As in a story book — once-once.
In Mikháleshik at night in the cemetery
A Golem with a voice turned clear
With a face of a ghost
And dressed in shrouds
Used to do a hopka to wake the dead.
◊

◊

O Mikháleshik

Once upon a time there was a story:
A smoky little hut, as if made of clouds,
On the earthen floor, a snuffed out sky.
Death lives in the nearby graveyard,
With a body of grass, a heart of mould.
◊
O, Mikháleshik, my heritage of clean muddy streets,
With grandmother stories,
Dirty-faced children playing the games of angels,
With the distant Viliya River
Coming to quench your thirst.
◊
O, Mikháleshik, my heritage of bright darknesses,
Of grandmother’s maybes and grandfather’s whys,
Of Talmud-dancing fingers: the seventh nuance of a nuance,
Where little breezes comb the grasses of the Koomsa,
Where every grain of sand is miracle,
Every little worm — God.
◊
Through me —
Your springtime restlessness driving the first ice floes,
The shivers of boys and girls on the banks of the Viliya,
When every wave gives birth to a mermaid
And there —
In the midnight dread of Uncle Chaim’s smithy,
A lover stealthily sharpens his jealous knife
Through me —
The longing ruins are falling meteors,
Your narrowest path is bigger than all the planets.
◊
Through me —
Your hatred of Pig Street, the brawls of boisterous youth
Through me —
Your blind autumn will always sing of a thousand springs.
◊
Through me —
The wandering distances of your beggars,
When, barefoot and naked,
Hurled
Behind a ruined village,
They uproot in the screaming night so fearsomely quiet
And see the midnight of curses as big as a sinner’s sin,
Until like beggar sacks of horror they begin to dawn
And through me —
The desolation of stray dogs with flogged hides
The murderous bark,
That dares to chase away the frost and hunger.
◊
Mikháleshik, dark reality and pure legend,
You gave me
Words — not with rich juices of September
Where stars lie drunk upon full, laden grapes,
But where in mended sacks the carcass of a summer
Frightens fall houses with scarcity and frost.
◊
You gave me
Words — oldtimers, bent under the burden of gray wisdom,
And words for clandestine walks,
When moony silence boils in love-blood
And minutes rush to seduce each other,
◊
Words that play out a young eternity,
As the aged plays young in the desirous wine,
Words that chase
The wheel of the sun through eternal night.
◊
Mikháleshik, dark reality and pure legend,
You gave me
Words — heavy, mighty camels,
Laden with patience for endless deserts —
Through jackals’ wild distances, ready
To wash their thirst in blazing sand,
◊
And words light as weightless light
That dawns freedom in a death cell.
Words, through pitch-black woods,
Crawling on their wounds to spy out the enemy,
Words, locked under a thousand locks
That ghosts and murderers cannot budge.
◊
Words — stars over city towers and crooked alleys,
Words echoing off screaming steel
With the modest sound of the past,
Words — raging squares
In love like Mikháleshik and as hungry as Svintsyán,
Words choked on gallows, words — death flowers,
Tell how much sound there is in silence,
Tell how much blackness is drenched in sun.
◊
O Mikháleshik,
You passed over my lean childhood
With the step of a tornado
And of all the songs left only the rattle of skeletons.
Cannons plucked your goat’s dawn,
When goats with starting beards called
‘Good morning and good year’ to the Morning Star.
O Mikháleshik, wounded ash of a lethal sunrise,
◊
Through me — the evildoer’s fiery whip,
The evil tidings of a crowing twilight,
Which sank over your every roof.
Hark, I saw you in the storm — a howling thorn.
O thorn, I love you more than all flowers.
O Mikháleshik, how could I not resemble you —
My joy, my poem and my blood,
Since through me (No —
Your death, your sun and your valor shine
The twentieth generation.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — —
◊
Goodbye, my nearby grandson — my distant joy:
In your little room,
I see the poor life of my great great grandfathers,
I see the electric God of New York put to shame,
With the same old demon hovering round a mourning candle.
I see my strong race flickering in the same glimmer
That brings smoky serpents onto the ceiling.
At your ruin walls, I recognized
In the wind the same songs of need.
◊
Goodbye, my nearby grandchild — my distant joy:
You’re named after me and my proud family —
A lineage of millers, woodcutters and Viliya raftsmen,
A lineage of grandfather giants,
Who rode on horses as on lightning bolts to their chosen ones —
A lineage to be invoked together with Samson on the day of
memory.
◊
Good Night, O good Grandmother Mona:
Mikháleshik — the poorhouse in love,
Did not yet have a roll to chew,
And hunger, the ugly lizard
Brings too soon the garment-rending of the mourner.
◊
On Pig Street, when orchards are not yet green,
In the cursed ruins, beggars’ children do turn green,
And over the crooked paths still the dominion
Of demonic spirits.
◊
Wrinkled autumns still lament in the graveyard hut.
Above the just-cleansed horror of the corpse board,
The moon still hangs like a robber’s silver sack.
◊
Grandmothers who have cried themselves out
In psalm-chanting midnights
Still look to find for you
The bread of Leviathan and salt of the moon —
And still cannot find for you
A place in the Garden of Eden.
◊
Now Goodnight, my good grandmother Mona.
With generations of the poorhouse in your eyes,
Hark, I see you, a living women’s prayerbook,
Bent over all your good deeds.
Hark, I see you,
Vainly looking for the promised sunrises,
But the trampled yesterday
Can no longer find your lost suns.
But in my bones, in my blood,
Your long set day
Now arises.

Poems from The Simple Dream (1947):

Alas, my mother is no more in the dancing circles of light.
My mother would have cooked potato kneidlach and Esau’s lentils,
And dressed up in her Sabbath garb to greet the parades.
O my mama would have baked Mikháleshik Strudel.
For the sake of her good children, my mother left
With the restless clouds, the longing wanderers.
In the suspect autumns she watches their every turn,
Lest the clouds, God forbid, be a disguised gang,
Loaded with gunpowder rain against her Elinke.
◊
My mother would have said now:
“Alas alack,
What doctor can heal a mother’s wounds?
What victory is stronger than the tear of a mother
Who gave up her son to the sun of the world?
What babbler can tell a mother
That somewhere he blossoms in an imaginary field,
That somewhere he will live — a hero forever.”

◊
When the last bullet falls from the last rifle,
And light and wind remain, pure as a child’s laugh —
A grieving flower will darken the days,
A flower black with night and fear and the ash of bones,
A flower from the ghettoes of Lithuania and Poland.
At the limpid call of every dawn,
My mother Badonna will emerge from my song
To weep for the saints of my generation.
In a world of flowers she will seek a thorn,
And on a stump that never savored
Sun or dew or soil,
She will find the black flower.
O the black flower — a goblet of slaveland Egypt,
Will enchant, drunk on my mother’s tears,
And toast a bloody L’chaim to my generation.

◊
The End of Days

I see the simple dream of honest people.
They will toss away the millennial yoke.
The misery of crooked ruins — an ancient hump —
Will sit in legend, under a mountain of moss,
Chased away from man, sun, space and time.
◊
Dawn will thrust out the long long nights.
Of beggar and king, queen and whore,
Of poor and rich, of all the dirty evil —
What will remain is:
In a gray sky — wandering days,
Of old clouds — a turgid river.
◊
People will strike springs even from a rock.
The holiday of labor — the nimble everyday
Can pull rays even out of death.
At the End of Days of wolf and lamb, of child and serpent,
The plowshare — the former sword —
Will plow the evil of the new earth
Up to the last shadow, the last sound.
◊
The old world, a witch with smashed teeth,
Will claw through the locks of demolished jails.
Hatred will remain sucked empty of its gall.
A wind will come from my choked generation,
Will swallow the ashes of charred gallows.
O my every letter swears with the honest ink:
What will remain is the world — a beautiful tale,
Facing the eternal peace of the rainbow.

◊

A Song to Khayke

Jewish girl, Khayke from Mikháleshik,
With the two-thousand-year line of Mother’s Sacred Yiddish,
Simple and flowing like a Lithuanian stream is your name.
My whole life I caressed your modest charm.
My whole life I kissed your every wound.
◊
So, it’s easy for me to know
How much faith in the first glow of morning:
One gaze at you and I know
So much wandering is in your Jewish eyes.
◊
So, it’s easy for me to know
How much drunkenness there is in one moment of May:
One touch and I know
So much womanly magic in the rainbow.
◊
So, it’s easy for me to know
How a heart can bear so much festive light:
One hour with you and I know
How easy it is to span eternity from shore to shore.
◊
Jewish girl, yearning Khayke,
See,
A rose falls in love with a distant cloud,
But the swift cloud rushes off
And the rose remains hurt, deceived.
See,
How much life was poured into patient earth?
How much sap flows like wine in the full late summer?
How much blessing ladens
Every bending branch of an apple orchard?
See,
Only from a strong-rooted trunk can apples ripen.
◊
My childhood in mossy Cheider alleys,
With Sabbath angels in every weekday dream —
I have made them blossom through you as a rare flower,
Though your cradle stood here
In the stony vision: New York.
For you,
I now sow the fragrant lines, like fresh, smooth flowerbeds.
At your every step, at your every limb,
I stop as before a sudden miracle:
God, with so much lucid longing, the stars call us forever.
◊
Jewish girl, lucid Khayke,
To you my rustling unrest, to you my softest song.
From the blind depth my love to you shone like a sun,
And now
Steeped in the dawn fire,
I forge out of myself and out of the world
The ugliest wound, the blackest sin.
O in this age of destruction,
All my boyish joy, all my blessing song to you —
May it not perish.

◊

Mikháleshik

Mikháleshik, my village of poor Lithuania,
Where the wind used to tell the ancient legends,
Where every boy — a knight out of a tale —
Would lead his princess through enchanted caves.
c
Mikháleshik, through your nights I saw
Even pensive stars interpret the Talmud.
O I was your hungriest devoté,
And I heard in my dream the hymns of angels.
◊
Mikháleshik, my village of poor Lithuania,
In my every limb your wounds throb.
Your heart expires through me, cut up by the foe.
All your lament and your ruin lurk in me.
Sometimes you see the world at the rim of sunset:
In that sinking hour the sun shakes
As if the crooked shadows of demise
Triumphed over the wise light of the ages.
◊
Darkness is strong, in a pitch blind night,
And while you see no sign of a ray,
You think the horror night is eternal,
You think the darkness will never fall.
◊
Mikháleshik — my little village, Germanized,
The victory of German and Murder will never be a victory
And will never stop one pace of the sun.
With all the charms of mame-loshn, babies will shine upon you one day.

◊

O Khayke – O My Small Town

O my small town, O my barefoot childhood,
In a dream I sought your crooked alleys.
Through a ruin, a sick light still glowed,
In our garden an ash flower still frightened.
◊
In vain did I seek through you a leaf of life.
The second flood flooded even Noah and his dove.
Instead of children, joyful crows hovered,
Instead of Jews, burned pages fluttered praise to God.
◊
On Pig Street, among the dead, only Khayke
Alone remained — a mirage: an invented woman.
Night after night she counts the stars, she counts the dead
And curses the sky that will not stop being blue:
◊
A heap of ashes recalls a familiar face.
Mikháleshik on a cloud — a straying land.

◊

Khayke Among the Ruins

O Mikháleshik, blind, with no tears, I lament you.
Your curse is on me, who sees you trampled by the foe.
Your curse is on God who didn’t hear your wail.
Come, my love, at least in a vision may your shadow creep.
◊
O come, I am your destined one clothed by the moon.
The Viliya plaits water braids from dead figures.
I am the solace on graves of children and grandfathers.
O Mikháleshik, I shall walk with you to the stars.
◊
At the stars I will meet my bridegroom.
I see him longing through the ages — a knight in love,
Cast from the wells of a distant spring.
O come, my love — hero of ancient whirlwinds—

◊
Like Joshua in Gibeon, stop the sun,
May the Emorite fall today to last man.

◊

Come, My Love

My love, all that was life in me,
You will know in the flowers of winey orchards.
A summer web will couple us.
All that was night in you, my love will sear it.
◊
O the weight of a grave will never bend you —
Your Elijah’s wonder, a heap of tales in the wind.
Come my love, with Samson’s courage in your eyes,
O come, kindle the first ray through the end of all suns.
◊
Come, I see my people writes a shining fate,
But now, let the destruction scatter me out of the blue,
You must gather my limbs like Israel’s pearls,
And, my love, let my bones become an eternal lyre.

◊
O bright, the tormented today will become like my beloved.
As many as the sand of the sea, so much light will my people be.

◊

Yiddish – My Song, Khayke – My Gold

And he who loves, like life itself,
The simple mame-loshn that my people told,
For him your name is beautiful, O beautiful,
O Khayke, my song, Kháykale, my gold.
◊
Hear: a mountain stream rolls down
Into a spring valley, beautiful and tame.
Hear: the echo of a lover’s call
Caresses and whispers your name.
◊
The hangman’s hand, brandishing a whip,
Flogged every letter of your name.
You know the taste of mud and blood.
Your name, of fire and rock it came.
◊
O Khayke — my song, Kháykale my gold,
Like simple mame-loshn that my people told.

◊

II

O Khayke — Yiddish, Yiddish — my song, Yiddish — my gold.
Your word is thorny from the scorn of friend and foe,
With your letters you could build a thorny wall.
Every letter was kissed by my mother and by God.
◊
Your curse seethes with gall of a ridiculed tear.
Your blessing — Jacob’s ladder, a legend of yore.
Angels bring you down, carry you up to the stars.
In the black time, you are my path, light like you, my heaviest yoke.
◊
O Khayke — Yiddish, Yiddish — my song, Yiddish — my gold.
Against the enemy, your every letter flew like a stone.
(Hey, sour aesthete, hey, philistine with shaved sounds,
I see the same mockery in the murderer’s eyes.)
◊
Khayke — Yiddish, I walk in love through hail and wind,
As if the first tremor of dawn ignited me like a cinder.

◊
III

O Khayke — Yiddish: I am writing my song to you.
And my eye is so alert, my heart so clear.
I shake a distant hand through pensive paper,
See: a Jew reads my book a hundred years from now.
◊
He reads a storybook of my generation —
And Yiddish is not a weeping princess,
Yiddish on his tongue — an enchanted truth,
Takes him through poems, through graves, through stars.
◊
And at my dark confession, the Jew remains
In fear, doubled up from my word.
Over me and my generation — fossilized tremor,
Around him — the world, a nearby rainbow.
◊
And I — in love, will shine from the dust,
I will make you into a sun, transparent, pure and exalted.

◊

IV

O Khayke — Yiddish, Yiddish — my song, Yiddish — my gold.
My villages — Mikháleshik, Svintsyán,
Jagged and hollow — cursed by God, flower, and man,
Their light is now in you.
◊
The first light will chase the vermin from their lair.
Where maggots were, a bird will build its nest.
A twisted shadow cannot stand long against the sun.
Man will forever trust in the Messiah.
◊
The sea of blood and dark overflows its banks,
But even the longest night, starless and blind,
Will always fear our “good morning.”
In the place of thorns, a child will still laugh.
◊
And the child will laugh aloud in our mame-loshn
Through small towns extinguished by a Nazi hand.

◊

At the Dawn of a Child

My mother,
My wise Mikháleshik mother,
I saw you today at the dawn of a child.
You said:
“Don’t believe, my child, don’t believe:
It was just a black dream,
The shrouds, the cleansing board and the coffin.
It is not I who turned to dust.
See,
I am all springtime, I remain in every blade of grass.
For generations, I am ready to live.
Hear, in the wind my laughter, my eternal joy.
And the sun, like you, will love me forever.
Don’t believe, my child, don’t believe.”
◊
Mother,
I thought it was you
On that last Friday evening.
I saw an invisible, cursed hand
Tear you away from our Sabbath chat.
I heard
As from a burning jail a lost cry:
“Open all windows, open all doors,”
As if you suddenly saw a fantastic guest
Who brought you a gift of all eternity.
I sensed
The slaughter’s knife mirrors in the entrails.
◊
Woe!
I thought it was you
On that last Friday evening,
But it was a wind wailing over a bare thorn,
But it was a blizzard rushing through a wall of fire.
My mother,
I feel good,
I feel fine
That I did not see you
Scattered in dreadful shadows
At the set, wounded table of horrors.
O it was just a black dream —
But why, Mother,
Did my desolate heart remain so full
Of night, of lament, of mourning rips.
◊
My mother,
My wise Mikháleshik mother,
Death did not block from me
A single beam of your life.
Day after day, moment after moment, breath after breath,
I will love you stronger and softer —
But where will I hide with so much love,
Unless running, running, running —
From the seething hatred, from the bony horror of the world,
Fleeing to your starry purity.
◊

Badonna’s Epitaph

Engraved on my mother’s gravestone at
Riverside Cemetery in Lodi (/Saddlebrook), New Jersey

◊
Do not believe it, my child, do not believe,
Not I, O not I have turned into dust.
See:
With all the springtimes of Mikháleshik and Svintsyán
I am there in every leaf of grass.

◊

Poems from Midday (1954):

◊

My Father Heershe-Dovid

half sonnet cycle on the fresh grave of my father
(1879—1951)

◊

I

The empty table is still warm from yesterday’s l’chaim.
The empty goblets are still full with your glowing words:
“To my toil, to the crystal ice, to the coal — l’chaim!
Toil is creation, man’s calling: Let there be light! Genesis joy!
◊
“I saw a sunrise enact the creation of the world on a block of ice,
I saw Isaiah’s vision mirrored in ice as in a glass of wine,
And the coals, with their lineage of dark deep mines, show
How many miners’ midnight dangers lurk at high noon:
◊
“O-ha, so much kindness of fire is in coal
For the homes where even the sun is stingy with a penny of light.
In my oven, the long gone years arise again, twinkling
From the nearby once, the flames of ruined Svir, Mikháleshik, Svintsyán.”
◊

II

Father, in that old house of yours, you became a legend of Svir.
We five children are hushed in fear of your quieted voice.
In the pages of the open Tilim book, the loneliness of your vanished generation —
At least in the stories of the wind, your past will live forever.
◊
The air at the table is still scrubbed by Talmudic Whys.
On a leaf of paper, an unfinished letter longs for your hand.
Yesterday’s goblets are filled with today’s laments.
In the abandoned kitchen, midnight lights its dead light of Tilim.
◊
Through the five rooms, wondering, every familiar shadow seeks you.
The extinguished stove paints a frost with the death’s chill: Good night
To the ice, to the coals, to you, to yesterday’s l’chaim.
Outside, through frost and wailing of Shvat, even God cries for you.
◊
The meek shine of the first dawn stands guard on your grave.
Such a glow falls on the shadows, as a faithful wound.
◊
◊

III

Such a glow falls on the shadows, as a faithful wound,
The light of ice and coal, of Svir, Mikháleshik, Svintsyán.
You taught me old wisdom, as the old sun is ever new,
And ever new is the old gold in my song to you.
◊
Who knows as well as you how much holiday can be in daily toil?
The ritual of placing, measuring, cutting tall blocks of ice
Into straight, transparent squares like pieces of frozen sun
Can give awe, as a prayer to the Lord of the Universe.
◊
Even in the summer, the ice sears you with its frosty drunkenness.
And the joy of loading the shed with the plenty of fresh coals
Coupled with the plenty of dreams of the distant childhood years.
Father, the blocks of ice melt like Svir’s frosty moons.
◊
Your early grave nights shine back from the abandoned coals.
Over the road in the icehouse all your Julys lie frozen.
◊
◊

IV

Over the road in the icehouse all your Julys lie frozen.
Locked up solitude breaks out of the locked icehouse.
Each chunk of coal looks like an evil ghost, a black crow.
It seems every brick of the house will leap out at us soon.
◊
In the Passaic icehouse, the ice melted like the Svir sun.
At dawn, your Svir walk, the orphaned path from home to prayer house
Will wait expectantly for your morning steps forever.
Your steps of forty years have planted an invisible garden here.
◊
Where are the pious beginnings, the faithful skies, Father?
Did the coffin, the grave, take away all the skies
And leave me only a long, evil dream?
You are eternal as the glow of all the generations on your grave.
◊
Woe, is your eternity with no sun, no space, no man, no flower?
My song to you is a garland of ice and coal, of moon and grass.
◊
◊

V

My song to you is a garland of ice and coal, of moon and grass —
Ice of tears and frost, coal of eternal darkness.
Svir in my dream is the moon, forty summers of Passaic are the grass.
O Father, is the World to Come just such eternal darkness?
◊
Of all paradise, if you became just sad sand,
I shall love each grain of sand more than all the stars.
If on the thirteenth day of month Shvat you became just a set sun,
O how I would like to become every ray of your sunset life.
◊
O burdened with your death, curled up threefold,
I am the desolation of your first cemetery nights,
As if your death — a crow with thorny eyes —
Flew through me, with all your days and nights.
◊
Like thorns, your seventy-two years pierce me.
O Father, hear my desolation in the wind above your grave.
◊
◊

VI

O Father, hear my loneliness in the wind wail on your grave:
Such a loneliness as in the solitary tree in the silenced yard.
Your years of toil freeze on the naked twigs.
The tree is the guard of the yard’s blossoming summers.
◊
The tree shuffled back to the wall of the icehouse’s permanent winter,
As if it modestly stood alone in a forest corner,
Not to let its festivity disturb the sale of ice and coal —
With your dawns, its crown shone with light of the World to Come.
◊
The tree, like the Tree of Knowledge, emerged from paradise nearby
Through the tree, prayers always whispered songs of praise to your labor.
The wind carried the paradise all the way to the fresh, sad grass.
The tree remains like a bent over giant at the frost of the icehouse.
◊
Through the nights, you are the pensive stardust on every twig,
You see the backyard like a Svir streetlet, forsaken without you.
◊
◊

VII

See, the yard without you is as abandoned as a street in Svir.
The short path from house to shul becomes a distant star-way.
O delude me, fool me, my dream, to be able to say
You live, Father, like my longing for you in the distant star-way.
◊
In your last moment, God Himself sang a song to your toil.
See, Rabbi Akiva brings you the key to heaven
And counts and counts your good deeds of toiling at ice and coal,
Even more the good deeds of your dawns reciting the Psalms.
◊
You live! You live! — Like dew, like light, like the summer rain
That blesses the fields with love, fullness, lucky years.
Father, in the twilight between Svir and Passaic you will live forever!
You live as my unborn child lives on tomorrow’s roads,
◊
As my song to you that will always lament in the ruins of your generation,
As my people, you will always live, Father, live forever, live!

◊

Little Princess
for Rivke

◊

My poems to you are like you, so soft and small,
Filled with stirring of the wind in the evening rye.
Yiddish, like the brook over tiny pebbles,
Rushes to you like a rivulet, cool and clear.
◊
Every poem fits you like a crown on a little princess.
O Rivke, my girl, with longing as far as Mikháleshik,
Oh Rivke, my wife, my chosen Boro Park Princess:
I conjured you in a dream in the child’s heights of Mikháleshik.
◊
Our single room on the sixth floor
Is more present than all presents, nearer to all tomorrows —
A little hut of tomorrows on the sixth floor,
The furthest tomorrow is closer here than yesterday.
◊
The poem I am in the middle of writing to you now
Scatters in a thousand kisses at the open windows.

◊

The Flower “May” in Mikháleshik and Svintsyán

I

Now what does the mayflower do in Mikháleshik
If not show what is lonelier than a stone?
And if King David’s violin is in the wind,
King David’s violin can weep only in Yiddish here.
For only in Yiddish did my people see the sun here,
Only in Yiddish was the world a story here.
In my town, such a prayer remained,
A prayer like the hand of a blind beggar,
A prayer that even God may curse and bless
Both his hatred and his love in our only mother tongue,
Our mocked at, cried in mother tongue.
◊
II

Yiddish, with the tipsy taste of a first kiss,
Like my Mother’s gaze, will never fade.
Yiddish, to you my first scream, my last kiss!
Yiddish, glowing with the dazzle of pyres —
Who would dare shield himself from such gruesome light?
After such a fire, no trace of the foe remains.
Simple as candles in poor alleys,
Straight as the stones that raged
Against the enemy in Vilna and Warsaw alleys.
What broom can sweep away such tears, such flames?
Yiddish, blessed with as many years as the flower called May.
◊
III

What is the mayflower now in my childhood Svintsyán,
If not a blind, gray man in the sunset?
For here, a breeze, a flower, a star, a blade of grass
Can show their beauty only to their own grief.
A light breeze flutters like a tortured, bodiless infant,
Abandoned by father, mother, heaven and earth.
A flower is a lost game of morning joy,
A star is a child’s oozing eye,
And what in the shadow is grass separated from sun and field,
If not anguish chattering unfinished words?
An unfinished word is a holy man — ashes in the wind.
◊
IV

What is the mayflower now in my small towns,
If not a blossoming fear over graveless children?
For there is no one to see the joy of a leaf,
As if no eye was ever here.
In every light there is blindness
That can assault the sun with the courage of all annihilation.
The loneliest shadow frightens the most joyful ray
And in every flower there is the rage of a thorn.
And here the mayflower is a sunny death,
Here the longing for Yiddish is delicate unto death —
Delicate as a heartrending flute in the wind.
◊
V

Good that the mayflower tarries in my townlets,
And little breezes still caress the simple sound of Yiddish,
Yiddish that stayed behind in the rustle of ruins,
With the glow and trembling of Kidush-haShem in every sound.
O he who will not let us love Yiddish as a Mother
Was born loveless with a crow’s hatred,
Cannot stop loving only his own hatred:
O no gold was ever molded from the fire of hatred.
O desolate is he as a desert singer of a jackal choir.
Yiddish, how many stones, how much hatred will block our way,
Before we shall like the mayflower break out of the cracked stone.
◊
VI

Brother, without Yiddish, what is your childhood,
What is the mayflower, if not a hollow barren rose?
Brother, without Yiddish, without your childhood,
Without the mayflower,
How can one break free from so much death?
O Yiddish, a thousand years of dream, a thousand years of May!

◊

Yiddish at Midday

Midday brings to mind the healthy clamor of the streets — Yiddish
That trampled the thorns of all the world.
Midday brings to mind new generations, new Jews, ancient Yiddish.
O Yiddish, a thousand years of dawn will never set in the world:
If not in New York, then in Chile or in Tel Aviv or in Shangri-La
Yiddish will resound eternally like a springtime waterfall,
And Mikháleshik will hear Yiddish forever in a tender drop of dew.
So many generations, that many stars will not be lost in crooked shadows?
◊
Swear, brother, to this most motherly millennium,
That the sound of Yiddish will never fall silent,
That your step will not be drowned out,
That the dust of your grave will not silence your voice.
◊
Swear, brother, like me at my forty-six years,
Yiddish like a noisy wheel will not leave the center.
Yiddish always remains at midday after all the dangers
Generations in and out, storm in and out — end in, end out.
◊
O brother from Ponár, before I die, I will whisper your sacred confession:
Woe, without Yiddish how can midday be bright?
Yiddish — the voice of my graveless sisters and brothers,
Eternal as my people in bright midday.

◊

Evening in New York

I

Weary crowds drive out the day from shops, offices, factories.
Every turn of sunset mirrors my old village,
The sun remains in the glowing ashes of our burned house.
Weary crowds drive out the day from shops, offices, factories.
The sun remains like a lost wagon wheel behind a slab of night.
Of all the gardens, on every windowpane a dead rose remained.
Weary crowds drive out the day from shops, offices, factories.
Every turn of sunset mirrors my old village.
◊

II

On every tower I see the shadows of Mikháleshik straying,
In every shadow lives the face of a dear one from yesterday.
If not for the ashes on my tongue, O what remains of my small town?
◊
On every tower I see the shadows of Mikháleshik straying.
The evening lights in me every death that silenced my small town.
On Broadway, light dances fear, as if driven by whips.
On every tower I see the shadows of Mikháleshik straying,
In every shadow lives the face of a dear one from yesterday.
◊
III

Listen: in the wind Yoske plays a fiddle, Berel a bass.
The sun like a dummy falls behind the horizon,
Like my good aunt Beylke’s chopped-off head.
Listen: in the wind Yoske plays a fiddle, Berel a bass.
The day struggles, turning to stone in the roar of the streets.
O Death himself was afraid of so much death —
Listen, in the wind Yoske plays a fiddle, Berel on the bass.
The sun like a dummy falls behind the horizon.
◊

IV

The whole earth is a bed of wounds for the day.
At least in a dream my small towns appear — Mikháaleshik, Svintsyán!
O my heart is under the wheels of subway trains.
The last ray of my vanished village swears
An oath heard in the most distant dawn:
“No, death will not drive out a single beam!”
It is good that the enemy could not stifle our earthly dreams.
At least in my dream my small towns appear — Mikháleshik, Svintsyán.
◊
V

If my child will speak Yiddish, it will not be doomed.
And dying, I will see at the End of Days the distant flower nearby,
And on my grave, with my own step, my unborn child will come.
If my child will speak Yiddish it will not be doomed.
Even my last ray will not signal my sunset:
See, even with dead hands I embrace a bright beginning.
If my child will speak Yiddish, it will not be doomed.
And dying, I will see at the End of Days the distant flower nearby.
◊
VI

My small town, in your death there is the light of birth,
Though the wind will mourn forever the desolation of your ruins.
I will train every word of my mouth to promise:
My small town, in your death there is the light of birth,
Though every flower in God’s hands will be a goblet for your tears.
No cricket will ever stop repeating this song:
My small town, in your death there is the light of birth,
Though the wind will mourn forever the desolation of your ruins.
◊
VII

Ask Bar Kochba if our defeat is not stronger than the enemy’s victory.
My eternal nation trumpets from Bar Kochba’s silent dust.
Ask the deserts how much thirst of my nation rests in the desert dust.
Ask Bar Kochba if our defeat is not stronger than the enemy’s victory.
The longer, the older the night, the younger, the softer the new ray.
The vanquished day falls victorious like a saint from his gallows.
Ask Bar Kochba if our defeat is not stronger than the enemy’s victory.
My eternal nation trumpets from Bar Kochba’s silent dust.

◊

Longing

I read and read a thousand letters
Until all words resound from the paper
Until I become a blank paper.
My senses, sharp and thin as needles:
Through the evening noise, I sense only how
A blade of grass in the city wind grows helpless, crying.
◊
A moment of longing can stone you with all the stones of the world.
Even my fingers grow gray from longing.
Above me I sense every wheel of the city,
The sounds of cars like crows — a cursed choir.
I watch the broad avenues shrink into Mikháleshik alleys,
Every alley under the whip, under the German, whose heart is a thorn.
From every tower, from every hand, stone after stone falls on me
Until every tower is a hunchbacked hut of clay.
◊
Night. Restless poetry and starry tales.
Insolent lights mock my poem and the stars.
I go to you through all my poems, Mikháleshik —
I go to you and time goes back, back:
One step becomes a year, I am a thousand years old,
I am a strange miracle, a thousand-year-old man.
◊
Woe, my Lithuanian town, Mikháleshik,
What remains of all your generations is a pile of plucked grass.
In Uncle Chaim’s smithy,
A springtime of my childhood still rusts on the silent anvil.
In the Viliya, the waters still murmur
The vows of boys and girls in love,
Swearing eternal love to one another.
Instead of a Talmud chant, the wail of jackals,
Your sunsets are made of cemetery light.
My mother sees you in Paradise as a tree of death.
◊

Dawn.
I feel so good, Mikháleshik,
That your dawn never stops growing blue beside me,
It feels good at least to be near you in the poem for a single hour.
I feel so good walking over the unembellished lines /
As through your crooked alleys.
I rush to you from darkness like a blind man to the light
And call you as far as my thinnest affection:
Mi-kha-le-shik!
You’re entirely inside me, as the whole forest is in a single leaf.

◊

Rockport, Massachusetts

Rockport:
Your old alleys dreaming around the sea
Are embedded in longing.
Your alleys are like tales told by the sea
When you remind me of Mikháleshik,
But you are called Rockport — the haven of rocks,
You are a secure, rocky arm around the sea.
Mikháleshik used to huddle with a Talmud chant at the Viliya.
Yoorke the peasant pulled the river ferry to my boyhood dream.
O my town, my childhood of love,
I am trampled in your every grain of dust.
My people was orphaned, Mother Mikháleshik.
◊
Rockport, alien beautiful stepmother,
You rise and set on the canvases of painters — skies of dreamers.
A Yankee printer shows
How the waves around you laugh the laughter of America.
A Jewish painter shows
How the waves lament the millennia-old lament of my people.
A wave breaks a path through the eternity of rocks
But retreats — vanquished, deceived.
A wave pours the rage of the saint — Mikháleshik.
A wave boasts of her Yankee pedigree,
A wave bursts arrogantly to flood the last memory of Mikháleshik.
◊
Rockport, dawn.
The sun rises like a magic artist’s pencil.
The sun is a fantastic ball that children throw in their dream
From dawn to dawn, from dream to dream.
The sun gives away all her gold to beggars, birds and poets.
On the platform of the Widow’s Walk,
Shadows of stooped widows appear
And seek with sad eyes
In lost distances
The late fishermen.

◊

A Grain of Beauty

O God, if I ever sowed a grain of beauty, grant me
That, like Our Father Isaac at a well in the Negev,
As a clear joy, I will see Rebecca of Boro Park on a camel
In the Negev with a jug of water on her narrow shoulder.
◊
O really to touch with my footsteps the miracles of my people!
O miracle, purify us until everyone’s sin is changed into a star,
Purify us until the world becomes the beginning of Genesis.
To touch with our fingers the gentle light of the brightest morning!
◊
As many grains of sand, so many grains will be in the Negev,
As many crooked thorns, so many palms as proud as my people:
And to the Negev, the garden of Israel, will come my people.
My little town too can enter the Song of Songs, in Yiddish.
◊
But behold, the ashes of Mikháleshik bend our far day in grief,
Hear in the wind the millennium’s ceaseless lament.

On My Gravestone

1906-19…
◊
Brothers, sisters of mine:
In the place where Yiddish is mute,
As this very dust of my grave,
There I have never lived.
In the place where Yiddish weeps,
As the ash of my villages —
O Mikháleshik, O Svintsyán, —
There my father and my mother weep.
In the place where Yiddish laughs,
Sanguine as spring’s wind,
There my father and mother laugh,
There I never stop laughing.

◊

Good Morning

The thirtieth century is near us, a lucky neighbor
Before us with blessings of a free earth, a new sky:
A generation comes, brave and new — a road yet untraveled.
O brother of the thirtieth century, our lucky neighbor.
Let me in at least for a while O lucky neighbor,
Thousands of years under whip’s lash, we seek a road to you.
Happy holiday, brothers, sisters, world! — A lucky neighbor
From Isaiah’s dreamed of land comes to us soon, O so soon.
◊
L’chaim brothers, L’chaim sisters of the thirtieth century!
See, here we are, reaching out to you across the last mile of time —
In the course of eternity, just a step to you, blocked by time.
See, barefoot, through thorny rocks, we pave a path to your freedom.
See, the fist wounded from breaking the locks to your century.
A neighborly welcome to you, we hurl the locks of time!
We live! You hear us in the storm like a tale of fear, guts and wonder.
We come! Years — fences fall. Near us are the far distances unreached.
◊
All our spiders are sickened by all the light of your generation.
I see your light in the Valley of Dry Bones, in the valley of murder and mourning.
But here, every twig, like every limb of the victims, will blossom forever.
Woe, the weeping of my generation will forever assail your purest song.
Your unsung song becomes a human of ashes — a gassed skull.
O what is Mikháleshik if not a rivulet of the Viliya?
And perhaps my town is the first ray of your every sunrise?
O if, like Mikháleshik, I too could be a rivulet of the Viliya.
◊
O it is good to be the dream before becoming, a sun before rising,
It is good to glow in Eve of Genesis, full of fire still unignited —
A word as yet unspoken, trembling with unexpected news.
And may Yiddish be in the crown of every sun yet to rise.
The New York evening reflects Ponar’s wounds on its panes.
Hear, even the April wind is full of the weeping of the Litvaks.
O it is good to be the dream before becoming, a sun yet to rise.
It is good to glow full of fire still unignited in Eve of Genesis.

◊

Goodbye, New York

Goodbye, New York, legend of magic-man and steel,
In my dream my village is a tower peak of New York,
A hut between the stars — a chimney of New York.
In all the wonders of wonders, there is Mikháleshik.
Giants from my cheider come to grind light-mills on Broadway.
Nephilim in: My Father Tells a Story, titans from the
Bible are climbing in New York.
In a motor’s roar I hear the voice of Joshua.
A simple wheel is the sun at Gibeon in New York.
◊
My first step on the ship in New York harbor
Is a first step through the generations of Jerusalem,
A tower as tall as Og, King of Bashan in Jerusalem,
A longing long as the exile in the port of New York,
My eyes agape with yesterdays lost in a game.
I will see angels of steel even in Jerusalem.
O the restlessness of all my New York years.
I will be a limb of New York even in Jerusalem.
◊
Evening comes on wings of fire lifting New York,
Wants to carry the city of all cities to the Negev.
One more gaze, one more weeping over the city of all cities
A multitude of stars — the ever-wakeful windows of New York,
Behind me, city smoke embracing city smoke.
Years fall into a wheel, a forest of days and nights
In a last last gaze at the city of all cities.
Forever shall I see the stars as the night windows of New York.

◊

Poems from Safad (1979):

Messiah

I know, father, Messiah will come from Mikháaleshik,
Riding a donkey through Svir and Svintsyán,
Where there is the holiest soil in the world.
I know, Mother, Messiah will come from Mikháleshik,
For Mikháleshik stayed in the Garden of Eden,
And with roots upside down, Svintsyán lies in heaven.
Where longing is like God, with no beginning, no end,
Messiah will come, O Mikháleshik, O Svintsyán.

◊

Eltshik, My Brother

If I am destined to die in Jerusalem,
Eltshik, my brother, from the Mikháleshik cemetery,
Bring me a handful of Mikháleshik soil,
And I shall be like you, the sadness of the Mikháleshik cemetery.
But if the German also lashed the cemetery to death
(O what is holier than Mikháleshik soil?)
Bring me, from the Mikháleshik cemetery, a handful of sky.

◊

Song of a Litvak

To King
Solomon:
poems of the
vineyards, even a
silly person can hear
and perceive. O I sing the
song of all songs to the Bulbe,
a song of songs to the potato,
the holiday of my erstwhile small town.
O Bulbe, of all fruits the most bashful fruit.
The apple does not hide from the eyes. The pear,
the scarlet cherries, shameless, tasted by every
ray. Any bee can seduce every flower like a
street whore. The Bulbe, like a Litvak, studies the deep
secret of becoming, hidden in the earth. Yea,
that a Bulbe has more mystery than all
the stars, that knows even the smallest grain,
the greatest sage on earth. And if in
the vineyards of King Solomon
happy drunken songs resound,
in Bulbes is the taste
of my villages,
shtetalach: Svir,
Mikháleshik,
Svintsyán.

◊

In the Clearest Land

Clouds are boats waiting for us in the sunset.
Let us travel, my dear, into the clear land:
Take off your dress, take off your body for the sunset,
Let us come clear to the clear land.
◊
The land is Mikháleshik, the light of my eyes,
So hurry, girl, hurry, choose a boat, my love,
Before the only oar — the rainbow — falls,
Before the sunset capsizes the last boat,
◊
Before night covers both of us with all its sorrow,
Let us run, run, overtake God himself in His path.
Look, my little town casts away all sorrow,
In the Galilee, every streetlet floats toward us.
◊
Night. My little town is paved with stars instead of stones:
Hurry, my bride, the saints will lead us to the wedding canopy.

◊

Epitaph

Where Yiddish is silent
As the dust of my grave,
There I never lived. There (?), Here?
I am the dust of my villages:
O Mikháleshik, O Svintsyán!
Where Yiddish lives
Brave as spring buds,
I shall live forever.

◊

Poem from Menke Sonnets (1993):

◊