Three Roses Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

I

Slivered sunset — shards of hot hail.
Time on my tongue lost its mind.
I run and fall like a stone
Into an abyss.

Falling, I pray to oblivion:
Splatter my memory with acid.
Later, I lie in the depth of an abyss,
On delicate,
Rosy-soft serpents
Of a dream.

The serpents suck out my memory,
Extinguish the smells,
Deepen the colors.
The knife of darkness cuts open a vein.
Time seeps out of my skull.
But my mind cannot
Free itself of itself:
Under the ash of what once was life
Splinters of God's image
Still glowing —
A vision of my mother
In her flowery shawl
And eyes: two candles in the storm.

II

You were hiding, hiding, hiding your tracks.
A wall split and swallowed you up in its cracks,
When Satan's mignons, like worms,
Sought your breath.

Sought — not found, and drunk, moved away,
Suddenly: who's breathing the wall, looks for prey?
A Jew … Mogen Dovid … Is it you, my child,
Or perhaps the savior?

Wrong, wrong, the Jew has betrayed.
He drags by the hair, you are stunned and afraid.
Your hair turns white,
Covered with snow.

III

An untouchable scale
Swings back and forth:
On one pan the world topsy-turvy
And I, crucified on a gate,
On the other — a teardrop.
The world swarming with me,
Has no idea what man is.
But the teardrop that would not be split
Can tell you of death.
It weighs deeper.

IV

Who runs through the dead city with flapping wings
Like a chicken with its throat slit,
That tore out
Of the slaughterer's stained hands?
Night enfolds him
In black smoke,
Unrecognizable.
But my heart,
Sensing what cannot be sensed,
Beats in time to that running.
It runs faster, faster,
Beyond all measure.
Five times,
A hundred times
As fast as him.
It hovers to the gates of the ghetto
Marked by a plague with screaming letters:
Achtung!
Plague.
Off Limits to Non-Jews.
And there, it grabs the figure by the collar
Like a thief

And in the light of broken eye-white panes,
It sees:
A man as big as a thimble
And bigger than everybody else,
Windy naked.
His skin of blue, wavy glass,
Transparent,
Reveals (it's scary to believe):
All the inside, the hidden:
A horde of senses fettered in chains
Like criminals
And over them a purple whip.
And every single sense
Bites the other's throat:
— It's your fault, yours.
And screams in Yiddish …

The right eye is gold-blue,
A monument to a childhood
In the grave of a diamond.
The left eye, seen everything,
A cloud empty of lightning,
And on the cloud, a cataract —
A yellow Mogen Dovid.

V

Either because my Golem-head wants to break through the earth,
Or because the soles of my feet long to see the stars —
I am drawn to fly off the roof with the sharpness of a sword
And, out of vengeance, to destroy myself.

VI

No, your words are too gracious, too maternal.
Consolation won't heal when sin is defiled.
If I'm too weak to stab your murderer —
On myself I must bring a vengeance wild.

Payment must come. I, your offspring,
Of my own fate I must be the judge. I wail:
As a broken bone wants to flee from its pain,
My soul wants to break out of its jail.

And maybe this reckoning is abysmally false
And this is the punishment: myself to torment?
And maybe your love has remained, keeping me
From leaping into freedom, forever pent?

VII

I open a window to let in the frost,
Let the moon hang me in the noose of her shine.
My budding gets warmer as I freeze,
Farther from home and closer to you.

VIII

You had swum across the river —
You are free
And your life-color
Went off with the waves.

On the other shore
There is no memory.
You don't even recall
How you got there,
For you left death
On this side.

And on this side am I
With our dying in my brain,
Suckling me, feeding,
Like your milk in the beginning.
But I cannot touch you, Mama.

For you are a mist
Spun out of tears,
And I — a tangle
Of sliced-up words
(Just one word: vengeance
Still gasping).
I wait for the river
To pull off, stream away
Under my footsteps,
And my life-color —
To catch up with yours.

IX

I shall take a spade and walk off to seek you,
I shall plow up fields, dig up graves.
I shall ask the grass, I shall taste the thorns
And feel your shadow on my arms.

And if I cannot reach out to you,
I shall dig into words and spade into sound.
Until I shall free the beautiful roses
Of the dark land where they went down.

Vilna Ghetto, October 1942