An essay in last month’s Town Topics, a Princeton gazette, begins on target: “This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924—a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died, it was Kafka.”[i] Given that “immensity of presence,” one would be hard put to define concisely its core significance. But I will attempt to get to that core by example—the core being the difficult beauty of Kafka’s writing, a beauty that is full of thought, and which has inspired, as is well known, a great variety of attempts to understand it. For Theodor Adorno, in a celebrated essay, satisfying the need to understand Kafka is a matter of life and death!
Poetry & Fiction
Into the Woods
Hope sparked by a bright field. Sorrow, the woods.
We caution children, Don’t go in the woods.
Stuck and Moving (“Read Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetry & Go to War-torn Gaza”)
I have been reading and writing poetry ever since I was a boy growing up in Huntington, Long Island, not far from where Walt Whitman was born and raised, and where he founded the newspaper, The Long Islander, which published my column on high school sports. At the age of 82, I still turn to poetry more often than to newspapers for news of the world, local, national and international. Recently, I read and reread the timely and (perhaps) timeless poems about Gaza in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights.
That book appeared in print at about the same time that the author and members of his family, including his wife and children—and thousands of other Gazans—were detained by Israeli soldiers. Fortunately, Toha’s wife and children were released and allowed to travel to Egypt where the poet joined them, and then wrote and published an eye-opening account of his own harrowing arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. That narrative was published in January 2024 in The New Yorker. In a short time, it has alerted readers around the world to Toha’s poetry and to his own newsworthy story.
Last Hour of Every Angel
I
…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.
Like the Night
He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.
Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.
Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.
“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.
X Factor
The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”
Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]
And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)
…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…
To the God of Abraham
You
make me taste your
……………….vastness on my tongue
then dismiss me
one of many loved
……………….beneath the belly of the sun
Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)
Fate
If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?
If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.
And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….
Israel. Gaza. May 2021.
To Be A Giraffe
1.
Like soft yellow clouds speckled in brown,
the Masai giraffes cross the Kenyan safari.
I was a giraffe once, too, in my mind,
even though I was the shortest in my class,
hanging on to high branches
to be nourished from above—
my imagination, books, arts.
On the earth, lonely, not matching my classmates,
vigilantly searching from my distance after possible dangers.
A child in the Ramat Sharet elementary school in Jerusalem
with her head up in the mountains of Africa,
reading repeatedly ‘Lobengulu King of Zulu’ by Nachum Guttman.
News from Nowhere (A Land Beyond Vengeance): Poems by Aharon Shabtai
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet…”
What follows are two poems from J’Accuse (New Directions, 2003) by Aharon Shabtai, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole.
Planet X
..Still, there’s the desire to fuck.
..There’s morning cigarettes.
..There’s the sun, post-orgasmic, after the death of all superstructures and erections. The shade cum sliding down her thigh earth night secret smile sleep dark no dream
..Pearls and scars
..A few more good poems to read, fewer still to write.
..The collapse of empires, master races, meta narratives, ethical sadomasochisms, bourgeois psychology, teleology of hope.
..There’s no need to rebuild anything.
Betrayal
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
Skies Over Israel
Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them…If they have a million displaced persons, we have 150,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.
Abyss (whatever the fuck that is…)
Intifada
“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”
..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…
Failing Upward (Two Poems)
Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
Upside Down
Thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin
Saint Peter has grown horns,
and Dionysius, wears Italian moccasins.
Peasant are crowned, and kings revel
in shovelling manure.