Abraham Sutzkever Poems

I shall leave behind nothing, nothing.
His Excellency Nothing I shall not leave
For others: over there, what has happened may recur,
With Adam-Eve like old acquaintances.
...

Snowlight, field-in and field — up to my father,
Suntears drip in the snow — up to my father.
Seventy years I walk among snowlight
To reach my father on time.
...

My father is a floe on rivers of Siberia,
My mother is a bonfire on Viliya's mire,
But both are inside me,
The floe and the bonfire.
...

You remember when your hours
Were born one by one:
Every hour — another hue and fate.
...

A man transformed himself into a saw.
Except for me, no one could see him breathe.
And people, when they crossed his jagged path,
Could feel in their own flesh his sawing teeth.
...

Oh, Lithuania, homeland mine, serpent's bite in my heart,
Storks, vaulted in my memory over your black forests,
Like Kabbalistic signs, gild the rims
Where your fir trees rustle on Viliya's banks.
...

I thank and I praise the scorpion
For giving me drunken pain.
Before poppies light up and go on
And the mist is blooming again.
...

I know a forest: a madhouse for trees,
Locked in the forest. The watchman keeps the key.
The trees rip the birds off their heads. Rustle to the silence.
In a storm, they drink the wine of its lightning.
...

In love,
I drowned in grass.

At thirty,
...

A string of birds seeks in the sun strewn seeds of sound
To sing silence to a dreamer in the grass.
...