A Bunch Of Grapes Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

I

In love,
I drowned in grass.

At thirty,
I drowned in tears.

Now I drown in the desert
And am ever thirsty.

II

I saw in the desert a bunch of grapes,
A bunch of grapes with a drunken gaze.

And I must rush,
Run for miles,
To come back
To yesteryear's day.

III

You are too near for me to go away.
Unless I doff the linen dream,
Unless I go far from myself
Till the last abyss.

The sages say:
Not just the earth is of sea and of rock and is round
As a tear.
I shall come to the gray-haired mirror
And smite it so uneternally long
With the bone of my skull,
Till a Voice-of-Thin-Silence rises
In the void behind the glass:

You are too near for me to go away.

1978