There is no doubt he’s the most popular poet in this country, even though there is a controversy about his style.   Anyway we had a zoom with him tonight and it was so sweet – so colorful, so Iraqi, such a great insight into Israeli society.

The only problem was that somehow we screwed up the advertising – somehow we had a small audience.  We usually have 70 odd people and tonight was 25,  I’ll have to screen the recording of the zoom first.

Here’s the last poem of his I’ve translated.  

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.

Translated from the Hebrew by Karen Alkalay-Gut