blog, poetry
I don’t know how many poems have been written about the shortest day of the year (Called St. Lucy’s because she was the saint of light) but they are usually all depressing.  We have a feast of lights in so many religions to counter the shortness of the days.  But certainly Donne had much to be depressed about, and the short day must have made it worse.  
 
John Donne
 
A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day
 
‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death – things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death – which word wrongs her –
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.
 
 

december 21, 2020 – john donne – St Lucy Read Post »

blog, poetry

The journal of the Israel Association of Writers in English, which I chair, is coming out very soon and the launch is tonight.  7:30 Israel time.  Email me for the link, but I fear you may be too late.  The theme is ‘kisses’. and there are so many people who want to hear about kisses it may be impossible to satisfy their curiosity.   For example, do you know there’s a difference between a Western kiss and an Arab kiss?  

december 17, 2020 – reading tonight and kisses Read Post »

blog, poetry

I miss making music.  i really do – reading a poem with music…   I’ve been recording poems with Robert Priest – he gives me instructions how to do it, and Ezi and I work on them, send them to him, and he gives us more instructions.  patiently.

Roy Yarkoni just sent me the link to where he put our Thin Lips album.  It’s here. the whole album for free.  

i even learned a bit about performing

as you can see here from a short clip

Roy went on to take my poetry and make three more albums with Panic Ensemble and they were very successful but I still think we would have been better alone.  Here’s one album

it would be great to hear what you think of these.  Lately I only get letters from people who want something from me.  

 

december 16, 2020 – music Read Post »

blog, poetry

i’m on a zoom evening with the Hebrew Writers association, but nothing is happening.  For the past hour we’ve been doing sound checks and lighting and only now it has begun.   Writers from Poland, Hungary, France, Argentina and Israel are watching each other, waiting their turn to read a poem about light.  my poem – is about a suitcase full of all our poems –

SUITCASE

 

Let me put the poems in a suitcase

and carry them with me everywhere —

like mulch, like dressing, I say:

Not separate spots of time, with their

renovating virtue, but blended —

losing all sense of separateness,

temperature, subject-object distinction

 

and when I pass through customs

and open the grip, the mist

will rise through the airport

transforming everyone who passes though–

coming or going.

 

 

 

 

 

december 14, 2020 – hebrew writers zoom Read Post »

blog, poetry

in the past few days some rules have changed on this site – technically.  or maybe i’ve just forgotten the rules, and it is not as easy for me to be spontaneous.  couldn’t even get the title to work today.  And if i have to have titles and follow rules, I just may have to find another way to express myself.  maybe I can find a free-dance class, one of those where older people are encouraged to find their core…

there were too many zooms for me to cope last night.  Tonight another zoom that I was informed about yesterday, that has me reading a poem in Hebrew about light.  I was informed when I received the invitation, and it sent me into a spin.  I spent the day trying to create a poem that would suit the subject, and when Ezi came home from the hospital and read it, he shrugged his shoulders – banal.  His hematological treatment, the cold I caught somewhere the day before that sent me to bed early, the vaccines –  all was forgotten.  the poem was trashed, and an older, less relevant poem replaced.  who knows if I made it in time to add it to the screen share.  

now I’ve got such a cold that if I joined the zooms I promised, I’d be broadcasting from my bed, wearing these fluffy white pajamas, my eiderdown pulled up to my chest, the Sambucol and a box of tissues on the bedside table, with an occasional glass tea, and speaking in a hoarse voice punctuated by coughs and sneezes.  

yes, I’m clutching my pearls.

 

 

 

 

december 14, 2020 – a taste of reality Read Post »

blog, poetry,

When my late mother-in-law would travel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in the 1920’s, she would set out with her family in the late afternoon, after the hot sun had begun to descend, so the horses would not get tired.  hear.  By the evening they would reach the inn at Shaar Ha’Gai, Bab El Wad, and sleep there.  Early in the morning they would begin the ascent to Jerusalem, where her grandparents lived (On Yaffo Road, in the building with the lions where the police station is now).   Last year we drove there (30 minutes from Tel Aviv) and found that the inn was undergoing renovations.  I didn’t think about the song, “Bab El Wad,” from the War of Independence and the battle for Jerusalem.  Bab El Wad was the gate to the city.

באב אל וואד,
לנצח זכור נא את שמותינו,
שיירות פרצו בדרך אל העיר.
בצידי הדרך מוטלים מתינו.

  שלד הברזל שותק כמוי רעי

Bab al Wad
remember our names forever
convoys broke through on the way to the city

Our dead lie on the roadsides
The iron skeleton is as silent as my mates.

Today the building has been commemorated as a national  memorial.  I forgot to mention that the poem “Bad El Wad” was written by Haim Guri, the poet of the Palmach generation.  I wonder what he would have thought of the opening ceremony – he would probably have loved the fact that history was being foregrounded but hated the fact that the right had co-opted history.

november 29, 2020 – Bab el wad Read Post »

blog, poetry

the world outside is of course going to hell – not only have we let hell loose by opening up schools and shopping malls at the same time, but a top Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated.  Whether we were involved our not, we’re to blame and we will pay.   So we stay home.  In fact, the worse the news, the more we make cakes.  Right now, Ezi is making a Dobos Torte.  Write me for the recipe

Me, I’m finishing up the  poems that I wrote with Robert Priest so we can record them next week as a disk.  Here’s an example:

Your Legs

 

“Your legs

Are not your best feature,

They should be played down,”

She said – and I looked up at her face

To see if she meant it

Since except for the blue lines

interlacing with red on the skin,

My legs are quite superb

And the crisscross of veins

Remind me of my father

And although I never saw her,

His mother.  I merge

With their chronicles of aches,

Long hours of standing

When the pain from below

Calls me back to my body

From wherever I was, saying

“Whatever you have to do

Cannot be as significant

As the generations that created

Those legs upon which you stand.”

 

They may be

My best feature.

 

 

november 27, 2020 – playing with poems while we prepare a third wave Read Post »

blog, poetry,

Because i am dyslexic. I always need a great motivation to read, especially if it is Yiddish or Hebrew.  There must be some trauma in my past connected to Hebrew letters that I have never uncovered.  But when i skimmed the Yiddish “Forward” and found an article that our future Secretary of State is the great grandson of a Yiddish writer, my curiousity and pride overcame my reluctance to read.  Meyer Blinkin came from the Ukraine to the US as a masseur and wrote a number of stories – none of which are available in the Tel Aviv University Library but i could order from interlibrary loan from Jerusalem or Bahrain.  I don’t even know yet whether anything has been translated so I suspect that Anthony Blinken has no idea of his heritage.  Worth looking into, don’t you think?  I suspect all Yiddish writing – especially in the twentieth century in New York – has a political basis.  The preservation of a Yiddish heritage even as the new heritage of multicultural New York is embraced is in itself political.  I love it and will look for his works.

November 25, 2020 – Meyer blinken Read Post »