Abraham Sutzkever Poems

Skeletons of ships on the floor of the sea —
Lie elephants with ripped-open bellies,
Where the moon comes to bear her children…
...

Stooped over, the donkeys are weeping in Jerusalem.
No more the holy old woman, the singer Else.
No one will come to feed them with sparkling sugar
And help them bear the wounded stones of the Kastel,
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Who creates the gray in your hair?
Don't you know, brother:
Between earth and sky, a spinning wheel —
On the spinning wheel hangs the gray fire,
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Among us they wander, the ashamed,
Their number
Seared in their arm
With red coal of hell.
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In the Sinai Desert, on a cloud of granite
Sculpted by the Genesis-night,
Hewn of black flame facing the Red Sea,
I saw the Great Silence.
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At thirty, my father's heart burst
While playing
Rebbe Levi Yitzhok's melody on a violin at night.
The fiddle trembled on his shoulder like a child
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Shall I start from the beginning?
Shall I, a brother,
Like Abraham
Smash all the idols?
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'Here is where Moses carried the bones
Of Joseph — to home's blue ridge.'
My heart weeps: my generation did not
Fulfill a will, restore a bridge.
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And you don't see the rain, and you don't feel a drop,
Flaming madness straying in sand;
And streams like warhorses wildly gallop —
From the rocks, into bony wadi' s band!
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Stubborn, the sunset insisted on staying
In the Red Sea at night, when they first
Come to the palace of water — the innocent-pink,
Noble deer, to still their thirst.
...