THE HEBREW WRITERS ASSOCIATION IN ISRAEL
LIRIT 3 - CONTEMPORARY POETRY
2004
Professor Ada Aharoni:
Founder and Editor of LIRIT: POETRY ISRAEL
CONTEMPORARY POEMS
FROM ISRAEL
Ada Aharoni: BIRTH PANGS OF PEACE
Adelina Klein: TORRENT OF BOOKS
Amos Meller: LITTLE PRAYER TO A PRAYER FOR SHUBERT
Balfour Hakak: A SCROLL OF LINEAGE
Chelly Abraham-Eitan: SEPARATION
Edna Mittwoch-Meller: SHALOM (Peace)
Hanita halevy: THE LAND OF ISRAEL IS LIVING HERE
Herzl Hakak: MY MOTHER'S MAGIC
Moshe Ganan: WHENEVER
Rina Levinsohn: HEBREW
Moshe D. Shafrir-Stillman: HAGAR
Pinchas Sadeh: EGYPTIAN NIGHT
Puah Shalev-Toren: IN MEMORIAM YEHUDA AMICHAI
Sara Ditza Kourtchy: SIGHT SEEKING
Sharon Chaplik: CELEBRATION OF LIFE
Yosef Ozer: COKE AND JEANS
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.
Sharon
Chaplik:
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.
Herzl Hakak
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:
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: 6. Hagar (a ballad) Yosef
Ozer: 7. COKE AND JEANS Adelina Klein: 8. TORRENT OF BOOKS Moshe Ganan
: 9. WHENEVER Pinchas Sadeh: 10. EGYPTIAN NIGHT Chelly Abraham-Eitan
: 11. SEPARATION Hanita Halevy
: 12. THE LAND OF ISRAEL IS LIVING HERE Puah Shalev-Toren: 13. IN MEMORIAM YEHUDA AMICHAI Rina Levinsohn: 14. HEBREW Amos Meller: 15. LITTLE PRAYER TO A PRAYER FOR SHUBERT Edna Mittwoch-Meller: 16. SHALOM (Peace) Copyright:
Ada Aharoni - Haifa, 2003
5. SIGHT SEEKING
Translated by: Ruth Tanenbaum
“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 child’s 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.
Translated by Mark Elliott Shapiro
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.
Translated by: Esther Cameron
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.
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.
Translated by: Moshe Ganan
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.
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.
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.
Translated by: Shulamit S. Nardi
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.
Translated by: A.A
Perhaps not my mother's tongue
However my people's tongue.
It is a bone of myself,
It is my blood.
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.
Translated by: Gila Uriel
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.