Self-Portrait Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

The city —
As if a lake
Stood on its hind legs
And froze in fear,
Covered with ice scales —
Its hoary violet creases
Trembled
When my fingers
Ruffled its glass face.

Echo of shadows.
Crucified sounds.

And I walked.

Pillars of light
Like broken stalks.

And I walked.

Where?
To find a human breath.
A living word over lips of clay,
A face I could greet with 'Good morning!
With you, the world still has a meaning,
And snakes crawl no more from the sleeves…'

And I walked.

Once, hunger dazzled me like Lilith
And I gulped a swallow in the attic.
Now, recalling, the swallow chirped
Out of my eyes her swallow vengeance.
No more tears in them —
The bird
Pecked them all out
In mad chirping.

Once, as I lay in a cellar,
With a corpse like a sheet of paper,
Lit from the ceiling by phosphorescent snow —
I wrote with a piece of coal
A poem on the paper corpse of my neighbor.
Now, there is not even a corpse —
Disgraced whiteness
Draped with soot.

And I walked.

The snows of yesteryear fell.
Tiny flickers appeared —
My home,
A temple
Nibbled away by lightning…
I recognized it by the childhood dream.

Like a lock, bolted behind my back —
A breath.
And nails,
Pounded into my body
By iron silence.

Straying over the snows in the temple
A hairy man appeared to me,
Bent like me,
Disheveled and bony,
Lit by an over-rotten moon.

— Hey, wanderer, who are you?
And, dully, the hairy man howled:
— Who are you?

— You recognize me?
And he, returning the question:
— You recognize me?

— Soul?
And the hairy man danced closer:
— Soul?

But when I saw the wrinkles on his face,
When I lunged at him in triumph — alas!
Someone seared my skull,
And I fell
On the border of glass.

1951