Abraham Sutzkever Poems

Oh, love your dog, your bed, your platter,
But do not love the gray time.
A faithful dog will not so flatter
As gray time will flatter you.
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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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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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Skeletons of ships on the floor of the sea —
Lie elephants with ripped-open bellies,
Where the moon comes to bear her children…
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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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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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You must possess the courage of an other,
From another time,
To be able to say: I.
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I shall write only remembrances,
Other people's remembrances,
My own, my innermost,
I leave behind
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Topsy-turvy city. I am your river. Bridges and buildings
Topsy-turvy into me a circus upside-down.
I see what only the waves in my memory see:
I am still drinking a glass of wine while writing in cafés.
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Inside me, a twig of sounds sways toward me, as before.
Inside me, rivers of blood are not a metaphor.

Inside me, they gather,
...