![]() How can they bloom here, three roses unheard?īring joy to a laughter, mute the scream of a crow. Though you live in my dream. Why do they charĭon't cover up, Mama, you can't fool your child! Your hand on my forehead is dozing: be calm, To hide it, lest anyone hear - for there in a corner, In each of your wrinkles my life is concealed. Your prayer brings to me the smell of warm challah, Mama-drops illuminate my faith with love. No, your words are too gracious, too maternal.Ĭonsolation won't heal when sin is defiled. I am drawn to fly off the roof with the sharpness of a swordĪnd, out of vengeance, to destroy myself. Or because the soles of my feet long to see the stars . VĪnd in the light of broken eye-white panes,Įither because my Golem-head wants to break through the earth, (Whence the strength?) subjugates all fears,Īnd the love of the world turns the dew red. Suddenly … like a piano playing among hordes of thunder,Ī voice of a child slices through. And this sound . "Hush, hush, I am the armor against all evil." "Ghosts of death, don't dare touch, I beseech you…" Slices of light swallow the fields. Fish in rivers scream. You are merely flesh and dream, and reality-is murder." "My child, melody of my love, play on inside me, don't rush, Weeps the glimmer of his eyes in the dust at her feet. "Who will help?"-"Hush, hush…" And her beloved Spit whistling arrows into the heart of the moon.īelow, on a hill, among white tobacco flowersĪ woman twisting on pain-and-wonder of birth. ![]() "You want? - I give you my life as a gift!"Ībove - in a death swordplay, metal pirates My hand gropes: a piece of glass, the moon With gold of our young bodies your newly opened pits.Ī spiderweb of faces in a swamp will spin to kill:įaces in a swamp-over the sunset, over huts… II You're thirsty, earth. We, wailing pumps, will fill Your nostrils smelled the stench of victim's flesh?ĭevour us! We were cursed by overconfidence,ĭevour us with our children, with our flags so fresh! Why tremor, earth? Did you crack too, in trance? Mocking our dream that disappeared in smoke. White doves turned into owls. They're poking fun, Sowed poison salt on open wounds. We choke. …And overnight our thoughts grew gray. The sun The titles of two poems were added later. The text translated here is from the manuscript. In her labor pains, she was clutching the poems in her hands. When I returned, I found my wife in the hospital where she gave birth to a baby. Miraculously, my wife fled back to the ghetto with the poems, where I no longer was-I had fled in the middle of the night, during the Roundup of the Yellow Permits. They were with her through the first provocation, were covered with blood, in prison under Schweinenberg's whip. My wife carried the poems through all the horrors and tragedies. This way I hid from the Snatchers who dragged off every Jewish male they could find. I wrote them lying stuck in a broken chimney in my old apartment on Wilkomirska Street 14. Approximately between June 25 and July 5. I wrote the nine poems of "Faces in Swamps" in the first 10 days, when the Plague marched into Vilna. The manuscript contains nine poems with the following note in the poet's hand: Subsequently, it was hidden in a ghetto cellar and discovered forty-nine years later in Vilnius. ![]() The cycle, "Faces in Swamps," was written in hiding during the first days of the Nazi occupation of Vilna. Reminds me of my fate, she's close to me, On spungolden horseshoes the autumn is galloping through.Ī wind with red blood on its fingers gropes every hueĪnd sings over fields a sad drunken ballad of old.Ī gypsy band huddles together like sheep in a fold. Will see us in dreams and will tell of our colorful tale. Till the wintery snow covers up every spark, every trace.įor then there will be in this world no more gypsy race,Īnd only the howling wide steppe and the trees in the vale Let us plait burning thorns into wreathes on our head, let them spin Strum all mandolins! Let us scatter our dance to the wind! We shall be extinguished, die out, like the sparks of our fire. To our gypsy race. We shall sink in abyss and expire, Hey brothers, dear brothers, I see how the end's coming near Till you yourself go down in the late sun.Įntwine me in their branching fantastics, Grinding legends, grinding the wind on the run, A lady sheaf, strolling by in the light -Ī bridegroom leads his bride where a cloudįaithfully makes them a bed for the night.īut a windmill is already grinding their sunset,
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