Ronny Someck

Ronny Someck Poems

End of December and the green of King Saul Avenue
copies itself from leaves, the fire
remains in red and the yellow is yellow. Tonight
during intervals of sudden rain she talks
...

Night showers wash the asphalt dragons,
water residues traced in puddles
and at four in the morning the language of myth
touches the edge of sidewalks.

At this pace flames will soon erupt from the throat
and street will turn against street.
The red light will be the light of a paper lantern
and nightingales will soar from Chinese legends to those of tomorrow.

Only, among the heart's rocks
(of he who can fall in love
with the spreading spot

between the nail's coastal plain and the fingers of a girl he
barely knows) will
the pink-frozen night of the air narcissus blossom.
...

From which thread will the demonstration banner
of Dir Hana's textile workers be woven.

A drop of sweat rows in the canals along a scratch on the palms
like a slave galley moving toward the Bay of Scars on fingernails.
I recall my mother's first years in this country.
A new immigrant sits in the sewing machine room of the Rekem factory.
Her brow is furrowed like a skein of wool,
the thimble a war helmet and the needle a sword piercing the belly of the fabric
out of which were sewn holiday clothing,
workers' overalls
and the handkerchief of the tear.
...

The usual way to tell 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.
...

My grandfather was born in the land of Arak
where lions with combed manes
lay posed as lambs.
"This is the King of the Beasts," his finger trembled along the bottle's label.
And in his thin mustache I saw the wind blow across the latitudes
and longitudes of a jungle I once dreamt of.

Luckily I got lost there.
Otherwise Jack Daniels would have been my father.
A mouthful of gin would have rocked the cradle of tonic in my throat.

And only in empty bottles that I wanted to throw into the sea
did I hide secret messages in memory of him,
drunk from love.
...

My grandmother didn't let us leave rice on the plate.
Instead of telling us about hunger in India and the children
with swollen bellies, who would have opened mouths wide for each grain
she with a screeching fork would drag all the leftovers
to the center of the plate and nearly in tears
tell us how the uneaten rice
would rise to the heavens to complain to God.
Now she's dead and I imagine the joy of the encounter
between her false teeth and the angels
with the flaming sword at the gates
of rice paradise.
They will spread, beneath her feet, a carpet of red rice
and the yellow rice sun will beat down
on the white bodies of the Garden's lovelies.
My grandmother will spread olive oil on their skin and slip
them one by one into the cosmic pots of God's kitchen.
Grandma, I feel like telling her, rice is a seashell that shrunk
and like it you rose from the sea.
The water of my life . .
...

The Best Poem Of Ronny Someck

The Fire Stays In Red

End of December and the green of King Saul Avenue
copies itself from leaves, the fire
remains in red and the yellow is yellow. Tonight
during intervals of sudden rain she talks
of Martin Buber. Such a Hidden Light from traffic signals
and car beams. And in my body her words suspended
like electric wires, under which the memory of her
swirls, a cropduster's acrobatics.

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