Ronny Someck

“Not Me” is replete with allusions to specific poems by Haim Nachman Bialik, Haim Guri, Yona Wollach and Yehuda Amichai – Hebrew poets who have attained the stature of ‘national poet.’

===========================

Blues for a Hitchhiker From the Navy

What kicks can be kicked in army boots

that are choking on the laces that bind them?

To what height can grass grow in the lot

that was never a plot?

Just a crossroads

in the heart of the desert.

As with soccer, I begin with the configurations:

On one side is her, a naval officer

and it’s impossible not to compare her shirt buttons

to the guard boats

in an extremely heaving sea.

On the other side, there is me.

barely a month after I was condemned

to a khaki uniform spotted

with gun oil.

Sometimes thoughts are in the status of one side

and when something of her smile was dropped

like an anchor opposite the pier of dreams

(and sorry about the sweetness of the simile)

I would be to her a gunner of the destroyer

the swelling muscles of the arms holding the rowing oars,

an oxygen tank on the back of the diver

and even a secret missile not yet invented

“There should be no misunderstanding here,”

I whispered to myself even then

“This is not the beginning

of a love story. “

And still, if I remember the fate of the door slammed

in the car that took her away,

it’s because the next day

and the day after the day after

in the navigation trek,

I was the only one whose heart’s compass took

To another place.

===========================

Rain

Love is a storm in a teaspoon

Sparkling in the cream center of a cloud.

Rain,

Rain, come.

===========================

Regards to the Waitress in the Student Bar at the University of Iowa

Her head was empty as a vase

and I filled it with flowers

that I scribbled in black ink

on the bar

===================================

A Letter to Marcel Proust

The clock you hung in the foundry of time

Stopped at the moment

You ceased being a soldier in the army of the wound.

Nothing is lost

If the words you describe the Madelaine

Is still a mouthful.

==============================

From the Blood Brothers Grimm

RED RIDING HOOD: VERSE FOR CHILDREN

Red Riding Hood’s nylons

lie discarded like shoe mines

in the forest path.

The wolves have pulled off

the head of her doll

and she, in a night blackening like a bat

remains to embrace it to the shoulder

===========================

SNOW WHITE IN JELLAZUN REFUGEE CAMP

A boy waves a popsicle like a machine gun.

From behind the strained buildings,

from every column, are laundry lines,

and Snow White’s holiday dress waivers

like a head in a hangman’s noose.

Her eyes too. Before the mirror are the apple

and the poison comb.

At night the dwarves will return,

masked

and bang fire nails

into the iron shoes for her stepmother to wear

on the wedding night.

============================

A cypress

planted in

ground like an

exclamation mark

at the end

of the answer

to whomever

is wondering

how

the ego

of nature

appears

============================

The 33rd Poem on the Minister of Loneliness

If I hadn’t read 32 poems

Dedicated to Tracy Krauch

Who was appointed Minister of Loneliness in the government of England,

I would have written the 33rd poem

And describe her sitting on the only chair in her office

Holding in her hand “A Rose to Emily” and reading

On the back cover that William Faulkner was

the only mailman in the world,

Who instead of delivering the letters

Would tear the envelopes to read of all the loneliness contained within.

“Loneliness”. She almost wrote in her diary, “Is

A fault in the gun of the suicide, the bullet that refuses

To be the honor volley of the funeral of the word end.”

But in the offices of the minister, instead of gun powder

Thrown on the floor

Rose thorns

Depressed stems

And the axe handle, that fell the tree from which the paper was made

That I abandon on its own the ink

Of the entire poem.

=============================

FIVE LINES ON TOM THUMB AND ONE FROM A GERMAN FILM

In the body building center next to the Shechem Gate in the Old City

Tom Thumb rides on the muscles glued to the wall

Of Bruce Lee.

Before that he was in a horse’s ear,

On the robber’s hat, in the wolf’s belly

and on the straw stalks in the cook’s pantry.

He knows even dwarves started small.

=============================

Rice Paradise

My grandmother never let us leave rice in the plate.

Instead of telling us of hunger in India and the children

with swollen bellies, who would have opened their mouths wide for each grain

she would push all the leftovers with a shrieking fork

to the center of the plate and almost in tears

tell us how the uneaten rice

would rise to the heavens to moan to God.

Now she is dead and I imagine the joy of the encounter

between her false teeth and the angels

with flaming sword at the gates

of rice paradise.

They will spread a carpet of red rice under her feet,

and the yellow rice sun will beat down

on the white bodies of the garden’s beauties.

My grandmother will spread olive oil on their skin and slip

them one by one into the cosmic vessels of God’s kitchen.

Grandma, I want to telling, rice is a seashell that shrunk

and like it you rose from the sea,

The water of my life.

====================================

THE BALLAD OF ALCOHOL VALLEY

Just sharpen a knife blade along the hip of its mate

in Alcohol Valley the sex knife spins on its tip.

Rock’n’roll cops push together straight ahead.

By the sweat of crimes – is our daily bread.

Oh, girls of the Valley,

Barbies in the dangerous game room,

who will part your legs tonight,

what lullaby will lower nylon lashes

over plastic eyes.

The Valley is a dream, an evil dream.

The moon is the night light of Dr. Freud.

P.S.

As for the meaning of dreams in the Valley:

When a girl is seen walking a dog – it is a sign she is lonely.

When a girl is seen walking without a dog – it is a sign

she left the dog at home.

===================================

IN REPLY TO THE QUESTION:

WHEN DID YOUR PEACE BEGIN?

On the wall of the café by the town hall of the immigrants

Ben Gurion’s hair blows in the wind

Hanging next to the sweet doughy face of Oum Khultoum

in the same kind of frame.

That was in 1955 or ‘6, and I thought that if they hang

a man and a woman side by side

they must be bride and groom.

===================================

For Samih al-Qasim

on the Day of his Death

They said that you

Are the guitar of Palestine

That you strung barbed wire

In place of strings

To play at the wedding of the bride

Who ran away from the nuptial.

You said that she is your land

And you will never cease

Writing songs of the fate of the ring

That suspends from her ear.

================================

One line on Bessie Smith

Her voice is the eyelash shed from the eyes of God at the moment he roared “Let there be light.”

================================

Kikar Malchei Yisrael. The Day After.

Remembrance candles in tin cans—

flame after flame like spots

on the tiger

shot in the jungle of his dreams.

His eyes, which almost saw the lamb

living with the wolf, hang suddenly

on the wall of blood

on the way to the heart.

==================================

wordless

( following “The Purpose of Poetry” by Penty Holfe translated by Rami Saari)

Among the sharks swimming

in the ocean of language

there hides a small fish called “love.”

With its own life

======================================

HOW TO KNOW THE AGE OF A HORSE. A LOVE POEM

The usual way to know the age of a horse is to look at its teeth.

At six months it has four molars.

At the age of two it has six, and these continue to grow until

the milk teeth are replaced by permanent ones.

At ten a crack appears in the back molars and it grows

to half the length of the tooth when the horse is fifteen.

Starting at twenty-five the crack slowly begins to disappear.

The usual way to know the age of love is to look at its milk teeth.

A small scar will mark what was extracted or left.

================================

POMEGRANATE OR THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE HANDLE OF DESIRE

I imagine the angel in charge of design

passing Eden near the pomegranate tree and knowing immediately

this is the handle shape God will want to affix

to the door of desire of the woman.

The angel in charge of names will call it breast.

===========================

This

This whose brain is the Commander of the body

This whose body conceals desire in the cave of genitals

This whose genitals moisten the lips of the hostages

This whose hostage is the broken tooth in the mouth shouting commands

This whose command knows no borders

This whose border is stretched like a sock

This whose sock is silent

This whose silence crumbles threads from the gnarl of words

This in whose brains words are stuck like a fence

And after which nothing is left to say.

===============================

Mosquito

Dita slept with a good friend

Of Ricco, Gigi Ben Gal, got upset when he called

The fuck, intercourse. She got nauseous when afterwards

He asked how much she enjoyed it on a scale of one to ten.

He had an opinion about everything, started babbling

That female orgasm was less physical and more emotional.

Afterward he discovered a fat mosquito on her shoulder,

Squashed it, cleaned, rustled the local paper,

And then fell asleep on his back, his arms stretched out in a cross,

Leaving her no place to lie. And his prick shrank

And fell asleep with a mosquito on it, blood revenge.

She showered, combed, put on a black t-shirt that Ricco forgot

In her drawer. More or less. Emotional. Physical. Sexual.

Bullshit. Sensual. Erotic. Day and night ideas. Not this. This. Whatever is squashed can’t be repaired. Got to go see what’s up with the old man.

=================================

In response to the question: when did you first feel the power of poetry?

After all the whispers despaired

of eliciting from her
the word “Yes”,
I recited the “Lament for

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”

she held my neck with the same hand that wiped a tear,
and leaned her head as close as she could.
Oh Lorca, I said to myself, it isn’t right, but without the lime of words
you spilled on the matador’s blood stains,
I would not be holding at five in the afternoon
this girl whose army uniform
was more wrinkled then the cliffs of the Zin River.

We called those cliffs the flamenco footprints of the desert.
The last horns of daylight burst from the head of the yellow bull,
and we were just another line in the moment that suited the darkness.

=================================

Uncle Salim

In the days when there was respect for train tickets

And they were printed on no less than green cardboard,

Uncle Salim would produce from his jacket pocket

A little stack he’d gathered at the Haifa Station

And helped us to imagine a steering wheel as wide

as the width between our hands.

We closed one eye, held the hole in the ticket close

for a second, and saw through it

a red tie sharp as a sword, that he wore

to diminish the shame of the rail workers’ khaki.

Then he would breathe in the memory

of the locomotive of another country,

And the cars full of stories from the Tigris and Euphrates ,

They would breathe air cleaner than the moth ball atmosphere,

That clung to the suitcases of memory of the new immigrants

“The train to Eden,” he heard

before he died,

“Leaves in three minutes,”

Just in time to load the cars

With the 99 years of his life,

The top hat he loved to move from side to side

And the leftover applause

he always saved for the voice of Abdel Al-Wahab.

=============================

Nails

In memory of Yizhak Zohar

To save his life in that war,

He sewed for the SS officers –
the very boots that kicked him.
“Look,” he once showed me his hands,
and I thought he wanted me to admire

the tough skin of a craftsman,
“Look,” he almost wept, “with these fingers
I would have strangled them, but every boot I made
saved me a brother. “

He never stopped hammering,
and if they’d given him a chair at the Academy of Language,
the nails would have had names like
Hitler, Eichmann or Mengele.
His pleasure would grow as he smashed their heads
and bent down their backs
until their complete surrender
into the darkness of soles.

Oh Revenge, if only because of this story
it’s possible sometimes to fall in love with you.

===========================

Four Poets in the Efficiency Workshop

Someone voiced regret that her laundry

didn’t have suicidal thoughts.

“It would save me time

if it would just hang itself.”

The second stored coal

In the mines of her eyes.

The third thought we should wrap

the hands of the clock in leopard skin

And wait each minute for the roar.

The fourth said, “I’m the poet of tomorrow.”

They answered, “Let’s talk about that the day after.”

================================

In response to the question: when did you first feel the power of poetry?

After all the whispers despaired of eliciting from her

the word “Yes”,

I recited the “Lament for

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”.

she held my neck with the same hand that wiped a tear,

and leaned her head as close as she could.

Oh Lorca, I said to myself, it isn’t right, but without the lime of words you spilled on the matador’s blood stains,

I would not be holding at five in the afternoon

this girl whose army uniform

was more wrinkled then the cliffs of the Zin River.

We called those cliffs the flamenco footprints of the desert.

The last horns of daylight burst from the head of the yellow bull, and we were just another line in the moment that suited the darkness.

======================================

Uncle Salim

In the days when there was respect for train tickets

And they were printed on no less than green cardboard,

Uncle Salim would produce from his jacket pocket

A little stack he’d gathered at the Haifa Station

And helped us to imagine a steering wheel as wide

as the width between our hands.

We closed one eye, held the hole in the ticket close

for a second, and saw through it

a red tie sharp as a sword, that he wore

to diminish the shame of the rail workers’ khaki.

Then he would breathe in the memory

of the locomotive of another country,

And the cars full of stories from the Tigris and Euphrates ,

They would breathe air cleaner than the moth ball atmosphere,

That clung to the suitcases of memory of the new immigrants

“The train to Eden,” he heard

before he died,

“Leaves in three minutes,”

Just in time to load the cars

With the 99 years of his life,

The top hat he loved to move from side to side

And the leftover applause

he always saved for the voice of Abdel Al-Wahab.

==========================

This

This whose brain is the Commander of the body

This whose body conceals desire in the cave of genitals

This whose genitals moisten the lips of the hostages

This whose hostage is the broken tooth in the mouth shouting commands

This whose command knows no borders

This whose border is stretched like a sock

This whose sock is silent

This whose silence crumbles threads from the gnarl of words

This in whose brains words are stuck like a fence

And after which nothing is left to say.

============================

I am a lot of Don Quixotes.

Don Quixote who with one eye sees how Don Quixote

draws with the tip of his fingers a woman’s head

on the wall built by Don Quixote from his imagination.

The imagination fantasizes about a horse and receives a donkey.

The donkey imagines the Messiah and gets the brush of wings

of the windmills.

The wind brushes the roofs of houses,

is sheared by the drawing out of a word

And slams the window shutters where Dulcinea gazes.

Don Quixote who in his blood steers her

to the Don Quixote of the lips.

There she takes off her dress and dissolves

like a kiss.

=========================

Families

When I dressed up as a cowboy I smelled gunpowder
in the family of the trigger,
And when I taught a hungry child to steal bread I kneaded dough

in the family of justice.
When I crumbled a crumb from that bread for a sidewalk bird I was
in the family of nature,
and when the bird sing in the cage I felt myself in the family of crime.
When I stammered I was in the family of the slowly silent,
and when I bounced basketballs I joined the family that scored

with one hand.

When I was invisible in the family of the blind,
I met Jorge Luis Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths”,
and when I read there, on page 9, that “the tiger asks to be
a tiger”, I sought shelter in the page after.
The family of nomads introduced me to Cain,
and the family of the irrational to Albert Einstein.
Because of a broken nose Muhammad Ali is a distant cousin,

because I black eyelashes I’ve earned a branch on the tree of crows.
Because of Baghdad I’m in the family born in the city of a thousand and one nights,

And because of one night in October 73 sometimes

I hang onto the family of the hyphen between the word shell

and the word shock.

After 18 years the saxophones of the Lord

raised pails of joy from the bottoms of their throats

and then, in one moment, I had
A daughter.

===========================

One line on Bessie Smith

Her voice is the eyelash shed from the eyes of God at the moment he roared “Let there be light.”

Rima’s Poems

Listen Ronny, If the men knew how to whistle

Like in my mother’s stories,

You’d be calling me “Rima Orchestra.”

Believe me, I’d just warmed up from their breath on my nape

And after their heads turned towards me

I provided income for many orthopedists

Who’d have to loosen up the spasms in their necks.

At night I sleep on a slant, alone in bed,

And my sardine brain is infused with skull oil.

Yes, I too don’t know exactly what I’m saying,

But where are the men who know how to stab the knife of words

And then say that if I were Jewish I’d already have been deflowered.

My dyed blond is the fantasy of Sammy the stylist.

I swear I didn’t make up his name. that’s the way he was born.

We went to school together at St. Joseph’s

In Nazareth, and during the breaks

He’d sneak in to give me a fake pony tail.

His father says that with hands like his he could be an engineer

Or at least a window blind contractor, and share the truck

With his cousin,

But Sami is hooked on his scissors, and from our hair he’s already built

Three floors in the middle of our village.

“What curls you have,” he tells me,

“Like the girls on the shiny pages of the magazines.”

Just for that I’d marry him, but

My father says that all the girls in the village hear the same thing,

And I didn’t do five units in English and five units in Math

To burn them up on someone who barely has an IQ of shampoo.

I wrote my first poems in the antique café in Haifa.

I sat in the chair they told me once belonged to Mahmoud Darwish.

Without words I hid tears that pressed against my eyes.

Poets are the world’s champions in weeping. That’s a dumb sentence, I know,

But my high school teacher said it so many time

I can’t get it out of my mind.

The best poem in the world Natasha

The wife of Ahmed the dentist, showed me.

He brought her from his studies at the university of Moscow.

“The Seagull” she translated, “is the bikini of God.”

Some Russian wrote it. His name is Andrew Wossinsky.

I hope I didn’t mix up his name,

But that’s how I want to do it too:

First to fly,

Then be the first poet who knows how to swim in clouds,

And then like that Russian, after one line

To fall in love with silence.

=====================================

A Covert Clarion Call For Queen Elizabeth and Baby George

My mother, the queen of one bench in Ramat Gan,

Joined in her heart with Buckingham Palace

To the Queen of all benches in England

And with a warm word

Knitted with her

The first wool crown

For George Alexander Louis.

Grandmothers, no matter where, are always

Rivers of honey flowing from mountains of heart

To dead-end streets.

================================

David Bowie sings “Wild is the Wind”

From the throat of the transistor radio,

the battery bound with black electrical tape

stolen from the emergency storage hangar,

rasped a voice endeavoring to cover with a blanket

the wildness of the wind.

That night my shoulder was covered with a rifle strap.

The hyenas’ wails broke onto the glorious fence surrounding

the army base.

Had I been a mental health officer for myself I would have written:

“At this

moment

the patient

stripped

Love

of her

Sabbath

dress.”

============================

wordless

( following “The Purpose of Poetry” by Penty Holfe translated by Rami Saari)

Among the sharks swimming

in the ocean of language

there hides a small fish called “love.”

With its own life it blocks from the world

the next flood.

======================

A cypress

planted in

ground like an

exclamation mark

at the end

of the answer

to whomever

is wondering

how

the ego

of nature

appears

==================================

tomorrow

Right now, every word is a tile on the roof of the house

I’ll build tomorrow.

It’s cold outside.

It’s not the slap of the March wind or a punch of hail

From last month. This is a blow beneath the beltless. Nature is

A boxer who knows only the word

“Knockout.”

Phillip sends photographs of coffins from Milan.

What a waste to sacrifice the red-brown

Of mahogany and bury it in the ground. I glance

At the last drops left in the martini bottle,

And remember the first kiosk of that drink in that very Milan.

In case someone has forgotten, it all begins with vermouth and eighteen percent of

Pure alcohol soaked with herbs. So let’s drink to their memory. Rosso,

Bianco or extra-dry.

Salah calls from Paris and reminds me that the evil wind is blowing as well in the city

We were born. Baghdadi Corona with arabesques. He composes a curse

That that was the last piaster missing from the dinar in the stock exchange of Iraq.

And in Ramat Gan I would like make the brush gallop

The way Bashir Abu Rabia fills his horses

With paint of eternal colors.

I want Kyuzo from “The Seven Samurai “

To save us.

To come and grasp his sword once more

Like a child who clenches his last candy in his pocket

To remind the cellophane that it must hide that sweet

From the teeth of the world

Tomorrow the tiles from the first line will be a metaphoric roof

Of a coffee house for instance.

There we will understand, at last, that stirring milk

In the bottom of the cup can create

A new world.

=============================

The 33rd Poem on the Minister of Loneliness

If I hadn’t read 32 poems

dedicated to Tracey Crouch

who was appointed Minister of Loneliness in the government of England,

I would have written the 33rd poem

and describe her sitting on the only chair in her office

holding in her hand “A Rose to Emily” and reading

on the back cover that William Faulkner was

the only mailman in the world,

who instead of delivering the letters

would tear the envelopes to read of all the loneliness contained within.

“Loneliness”. She almost wrote in her diary, “Is

A fault in the gun of the suicide, the bullet that refuses

to be the honor volley of the funeral of the word end.”

But in the offices of the minister, instead of gun powder

thrown on the floor

Rose thorns

depressed stems

And the axe handle, that fell the tree

from which the paper was made

upon which I abandon the ink

Of the entire poem.

==========================

Sea Squill

The Sea Squill

Flower

This year

In first

Person

Plural.

The stem

Of their flowering

Doesn’t

Recognize

The

Rules

Of social

Distancing

The plague,

And sweep

The mask

Of sand

Over

The

Earth

Fall, 2020

============================

Daisy

The autumn of flesh is the hardest of Falls.

When the almost-green eyes shed leaves,

The arm is a bending branch,

The leg a shaky trunk.

In a season like this, words are disguised as beasts,

And roars hide themselves in the throat.

The woman I’m writing about is

My mother.

If I had Arabic ink in my pen,

I would call her Scheherazade.

If I knew how to draw crowns,

She’d be a queen,

And in the courtyard of her palace

You could hear

The rustle of sands she sweeps

From the piles of strife.

But even now, when her gait is rough,

and the teeth of winter bite at her feet,

you can feel how much hunger there had been

in the fingers that wove the reddest of carpets

which on now she treads slowly

the remains of her days.

======================

She From the Floor Below

One floor down from the flat of my youth

lived a whore.

I was almost old enough to know

that red high heels and inches shortening her dress

were combat fatigues.

She had the name she was born with

and the name she invented for those craving her snatch.

Sometimes she’d pull out cash from her bra and ask me

to buy her Marlboro Lights perhaps to ignite

those who’d consumed her day.

And I was stupid enough to think

that if I bring the bill to the police

they’d find and arrest the owner of the prints

that pinched her,

and that after that they’d point to me and say:

this is the one who struck his

hoe to clear the weeds from her head,

the one who was always the gardener in the nursery of her dreams,

the one who saved her.