Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts

Amos Noy|| CYCLAMEN

Amos Noy ||

CYCLAMEN

 
Wondrously I grew in a little house by a big wood[1]
In a world, far, far away,[2] with no law or anger
On a planet where no fathers stood.
 
My mother nursed me on milk of wolves
To be big, strong and wary of strangers,
All of them dangers, and not err in loves.
 
No cry baby, I never wept against my will.
My mother, the engine that knew she could[3]–
Pulled her lov’d boy,[4] flew us o’er dale and hill,[5]
 
Not hoping for superfluous miracles or omens.
No rain fell on the dusty earth, no cloud burst
And in corms among untrodden stones, fair[6] cyclamen
Withered in their hidden thirst.
 
Haaretz September 25, 2022

Translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden
 
---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_in_the_Big_Woods
 
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXDnFYu91vY
 
[3]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2EhWYGbi5o
 
[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44455/on-my-first-son
 
[5] https://poets.org/poem/midsummer-nights-dream-act-ii-scene-i-over-hill-over-dale
 
[6] https://poets.org/poem/she-dwelt-among-untrodden-ways

Natan Zach || The End of the World

Natan Zach ||

The End of the World

                                    translated by Vivian Eden

Completely at random, the world ended.
Trade in shares was lively, the weather splendid.
Lovers lay in beds and some on the sand.
Artists painted nature, if not the lay of the land.
Professors wrinkled brows and wrote of weighty things.
The season was any season: fall and also spring.

W. H. Auden || Refugee Blues

W. H. Auden ||

Refugee Blues


Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

*

Source

For Hebrew, press here


Fady Joudah || Two Poems

Fady Joudah || 

Two Poems

  Sleeping Trees

Between what should and what should not be
Everything is liable to explode. Many times
I was told who has no land has no sea. My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.
 
Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.
 
My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.
No longer his village he found his tree amputated.
Between one falling and the next
 
There’s a weightless state. There was a woman
Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree
In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand.
When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew
Could turn anyone into one-half reptile.
I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being
 
The only one left. When we woke my father
He was running away from soldiers. Now
He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs
About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king
And tried not to stop. He flew
But mother woke him and held him for an hour,
 
Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward.
Maybe if I had just said it.
Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe
I don’t know much about dreams
But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead
Know about the dying and sometimes
Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree
My father used to climb
 
When he was young to watch the rain stream,
And he would gently swing.


SOURCE
***

The Tea and Sage Poem

At a desk made of glass,
In a glass walled-room
With red airport carpet,
 
An officer asked
My father for fingerprints,
And my father refused,
 
So another offered him tea
And he sipped it. The teacup
Template for fingerprints.
 
My father says, it was just
Hot water with a bag.
My father says, in his country,
 
Because the earth knows
The scent of history,
It gave the people sage.
 
I like my tea with sage
From my mother’s garden,
Next to the snapdragons
 
She calls fishmouths
Coming out for air. A remedy
For stomach pains she keeps
 
In the kitchen where
She always sings.
First, she is Hagar
 
Boiling water
Where tea is loosened.
Then she drops
 
In it a pinch of sage
And lets it sit a while.
She tells a story:
 
The groom arrives late
To his wedding
Wearing only one shoe.
 
The bride asks him
About the shoe. He tells her
He lost it while jumping
 
Over a house-wall.
Breaking away from soldiers.
She asks:
 
Tea with sage
Or tea with mint?
 
With sage, he says,
Sweet scent, bitter tongue.
She makes it, he drinks.


Source


Vivian Eden || WANDERING JEWS

Vivian Eden ||

WANDERING JEWS

            
Uncle Mendel, who had hair like
David Ben Gurion, was a payntner,
walls, not pictures. Afraid
of heights, he wouldn't climb ladders
or paint above the second floor. In New York.
 
Short on dollars, he saved a dime.
One Jewish New Year, Roish Hashona,
Mendel circled around the very big table
(eight aunts, eight uncles and Zaydeh remained),
dunking the one teabag into seventeen
yahrzeit glasses, not china cups,
of freshly boiled water.
 
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin
they'd chatter, and clink the glasses,
after dinner, Lishona toiva tikasevu,
as the younger cousins played team-tag
in English in the second-floor apartment
that smelled of mothballs and kasha,
keeping strictly out of The Boarder's room
while the older cousins
“went out for a walk,”
coming back smelling of smoke.
 
Aunt Rosie, who had hair like
Golda Meir, took in foster kids,
ninety of them in forty years. One made
money – In business? In crime? – died
young and left her a legacy in his will
 
so with bundles of kosher pots (dairy, not meat),
teabags and kasha, Rose and Mendel wandered,
by ship, not plane: Liverpool, Lisbon, Gibraltar,
Haifa, Marseilles, Buenos Aires and back.
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin,
Lishona toiva tikasevu
.
*



Death Retouched

 

Salman Masalha ||

Death Retouched


All around pain is aflame
From the desert to the sea.
Here my blood is now fair game,
This land, an abyss for me.

W. H. Auden || Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden ||

Funeral Blues


Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


source

For Hebrew, press here


UL Lafayette Choir || The Song About the Child

Live track from the UL Lafayette Chamber Singers in New Orleans.

HER MAJESTY


Salman Masalha


HER MAJESTY


Neither dust, nor a rock, nor a site
Shall I praise from the desert’s edge
Nor the reign of thieves that mines
Only nightmares under siege.

There’s no joy in my grieving heart
For a past, for now, for what is to be,
For the land or its tenants, apart
From just one: Her Majesty.

A tongue that lived for two thousand years,
And under blockade kissed my own.
They turned into twins, like lips
That can blend two hopes into one.


*

Translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden

***





Haaretz


For Hebrew, press here



Boston Community Gospel Choir || The Song About the Child



Boston Community Gospel Choir ||

The Song About the Child



Text: Salman Masalha
Composer: Stephen Feigenbaum









source: Terezin Music Foundation



 Find more, here


Ghostlight Choir | The song about the child


Concert


Ghostlight Choir ||

The song about the child


Text: Salman Masalha

Composer: Sivan Eldar

Mahmoud Darwish || ID Card


The Mahmoud Darwish Poem That Enraged Lieberman and Regev

An Army Radio discussion of an early work by Mahmoud Darwish has caused an uproar.

Boston Children Chorus || The song about the child

Concert


Boston Children Chorus ||

The song about the child

Text: Salman Masalha
Composer: Sivan Eldar
The Terezen Music Foundation

Balkrishna Sama || Man Is God

One poem from Nepal


Balkrishna Sama || 

Man Is God

He who loves flowers, has a tender heart.
he who cannot pluck their blooms,
has a heart that's noble.

Benjamin Zephaniah | Poems

Benjamin Zephaniah


Poems


Dis Poetry
The Death of Joy Gardner
Walking Black Home
Who’s Who

*

Sahron Olds || Sex Without Love


Sahron Olds || 


Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked

Vivian Eden || Fading faces in the rain


Vivian Eden || 
Fading faces in the rain
 
Of ink and identity: The late Samih al-Qasim on the ephemeral nature of the printed word as it encounters the elements.

Homeland Hymn

Salman Masalha || 

Homeland Hymn

On the mountain that kisses a star, the winds
flail and wail. This is not a wind that blew in
from the west, it is a wind that sighs:
Who lifts up his eyes on high
to the bereft land, which God has left
to its own devices, filthy with hate, imprisoned
in plaints and the flame of the sword?

Yahya Hassan || Childhood


Yahya Hassan || Childhood

Five children lined up and a father with a club
Weeping and a pool of piss
In turn we stretch out our hands
For the sake of predictability
The sound when blows rain down

Morani Kornberg-Weiss || Dear Darwish

What happens when a young Israeli-American poet 'speaks' with the late Mahmoud Darwish.

Vivian Eden ||
This conversation could never happen in real life
MIDDLE EAST
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ISRAEL-PALESTINE
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