MY MOTHER’S TONGUE IS NOT MY MOTHER TONGUE

My mother’s tongue is not my mother tongue.  And never

will be.  My youth did not hear a voice trembling with age tell, 

in Hungarian or Slovak, of her bitter youth, 

nor her songs of forest streams or the wind in the chestnut tree.  

Only the scent of the woods burning and the smoke.  

In this warm land, snow words rest on her hair.

Woe to the land that has no sea, whose dictator

is an admiral ‑ a complete exile brought my mother

by dry land through the sea:  words and letters 

adrift.  Tried by water and fire, like an ember,

my grandfather’s tongue was extinguished as well, 

like my mother’s, with gaping mouth on the trench’s edge, 

and who hears?  The orphan kaddish

is not my mother’s tongue.

My mother’s tongue is not my mother’s tongue

neither in the city on the Yarkon’s bank, 

nor in another river city nor in the

country of the sea, where the strange words 

with syllables of blood and guilt are buried.

And my mother’s tongue falls from my lips ‑

another tongue, a beautiful tongue 

in a gaping mouth.

SOMETIMES AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN

Sometimes and sometimes more often

as I sit at evening table

spread with a cloth and plates and goblets of wine

I understand the need to speak

and to be silent when eyes stare

And occasionally among the diners  the bread is passed

and the salt

and I understand the spaces between words

the silence.

And with the empty goblets, when

plates are cleared, crumbs, words swept away,

the rustling cloth is straightened

I sit among the silences an empty vessel.

 

 

HOSPITAL
POEM

         For Natan Zach

 

In
the hospital

I
read poems by Zach,

trying
out on my flesh

their
bitter medicine

and
all the milk and honey.

And
at night, when there is no reckoning

of
the state of the world or the state of man

I
read the disease’s diagnosis

of a
bitter romantic

who
is sometimes hot

and
sometimes cold.

 

And
most important

how
nice to meet in the poems of an unknown man,

Mr.
Zach,

and
perhaps too to ask

what
was the poetry of Orpheus in hell

and
why this agony?

 

But
these are words words

words
in the wards…

                                        translated by

                                        Karen Alkalay‑Gut