1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.
Poetry & Fiction
News from Nowhere (A Land Beyond Vengeance): Poems by Aharon Shabtai
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet…”
What follows are two poems from J’Accuse (New Directions, 2003) by Aharon Shabtai, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole.
Planet X
..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.
..There’s morning cigarettes.
..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream
..Pearls and scars
..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.
..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.
..There’s no need to rebuild anything.
Betrayal
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
Skies Over Israel
Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them…If they have a million displaced persons, we have 150,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.
Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)
Intifada
“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”
..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…
Failing Upward (Two Poems)
Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
Upside Down
Thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin
Saint Peter has grown horns,
and Dionysius, wears Italian moccasins.
Peasant are crowned, and kings revel
in shovelling manure.
Dreamtime (Pantoum and Ghazal)
After Hours
The lives we didn’t choose meet us in dreams –
teacher, pilot, maker of origami doves.
Landscapes morph or disappear
to house wishes our day-lives hide.
Breakdown
The rich take a plane or hire a car,
but our power is only waiting hour
after hour at the cancelled
bus station, waiting for the backup bus
to heave its way down from Tampa,
while the driver in cigarette-
stained undershirts waits with us,
repeating over and over, he “didn’t
f-up.”
Honey
My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law “honey.” One afternoon in the early 1930’s, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren’t fighting about Paul’s love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one’s life. I don’t say a good life.
I say a life.
Night Within the Night
[excerpts from Last Beauty of the Earth, a work in progress]
..One can be almost certain that the inflationary horniness among older millennials and Gen Xers, along with the constant mainstream jeremiads about the decline of sex, the inexorable draining of sexuality from the world (echoes of Hölderlin’s withdrawal of the gods), is revanchist, and prefigures either a fascist future of universal eugenics and Lebensborn programs, devoted to the sexual enslavement of the species, or a near-future, closer than one might expect, in which fucking has been abolished, or faded away, along with the money system, labor, the male sex, etc., all that shit Valerie Solanas wrote about. In the meantime, a spiritual disciple of Cronenberg, I carve my anima into my very flesh, I tattoo my name in Hebrew on my neck, Leila, לילה, daughter of the night, goddess of sex and the transmigration of souls, eternal flower and mirror, who is also the agent of the return to oblivion, to forgetfulness, to the unmaking of the flesh: time itself.
HUWWARA
David J. Wasserstein is professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Vanderbilt he served as professor of Islamic history at Tel Aviv University. He’s provided the following short introduction to his poem which he’s translated from Hebrew into English.
After the pogrom in Huwwara, on 26-27 February, I was like many Jews and Israelis in shock. That shock eventually, a couple of days later, took shape in the text below. It is a cento, a work composed largely of quotations from other texts.
Outdated Ghazal
To be reborn, break the caul of the past.
Take off the moth-eaten shawl of the past.
This moment’s open doors and empty rooms.
Portraits, mirrors line the hall of the past.
Cow blood on the sheet can save a bride’s life.
Danger of scripture, alcohol, the past.
Without Love
(a short excerpt from something very long)
..Without love (the mirror of love), I feel that I’m already dead, already extinct. I am part of the geological layer of plastic microparticles that will be the only evidence our species ever existed, if complex life were to evolve again from the bacteria that remain a thousand years from now. I am part of no story (biotic or abiotic). I cannot shake the counterfactual despair, the flailing wish that I had transitioned, had written these books, five years earlier, when the world could have received me, received my art. But no, this woman, this writing, could only have emerged right now, at this specific point in history, or where history cracks up, smashes against its bio-spiritual limit.