“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.
Lotem Abdel Shafi
The heart dies without space for love, without a moral horizon:
think of it then as a bird trapped in a box.
My heart goes out with love to those beyond the fence;
only toward them can one really advance, that is, make progress.
Without them I feel I’m half a person.
Romeo was born a Montague, and Juliet came from the Capulet line,
and I’m a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion—
therefore I’ll be delighted if my daughter marries the grandson of Haidar Abdel Shafi.
I mean this, of course, as a parable only—but the parable is my measure,
and since it has more to do with my body than teeth or hair,
this isn’t just some idle fancy that, out of poetic license,
I place our fate in my daughter’s sex.
That I grant myself this imaginary gift, testifies to the extent
to which we’re living, still, in the underworld,
where we’re granted the hope and potential of an amoeba.
But all mythology begins with creatures that creep and crawl,
spring out of the ground and devour each other,
until a sacred union occurs, healing the breach in the world.
The Arab groom from Gaza, too, will extend to my daughter a dress
on which is embroidered the Land redeemed from Apartheid’s curse—
our Land as a whole, belonging equally to all of its offspring,
and then he’ll lift the veil from her face, and say to her:
“And now I take you to be my wife, Lotem Abdel Shafi.”
..
Nostalgia
………………“Shall I weep if . . . an infant civilization be ruled with rod or with knout?”– Tennyson, Maud; A Monodrama
The dumpy little man
with the scourge in his hand,
in his free time
runs his fingers
over the keys of a baby grand –
but we’ve seen it all before.
And so, from the primitive East
we return to the West.
He’ll help solve the economy’s problems:
the unemployed will man the tanks,
or dig graves,
and, come evening,
we’ll listen to Schubert and Mozart.
O my country, my country,
with each sandal,
with each thread
of my khaki pants,
I’ve loved you –
I could compose
psalms to a salad
of white cheese and scallions.
But now, who will I meet
when I go out for dinner?
Gramsci’s jailers?
What clamor will rise
up through the window facing the street?
And when it’s all over,
my dear, dear reader,
on which benches will we have to sit,
those of us who shouted “Death to the Arabs!”
and those who claimed they “didn’t know”?
..
Editor’s Note: Pace Lynn Zorn who steered First to Shabtai’s poetry, which she encountered online during the second war in Lebanon. The poem Zorn read back then has been published in Shabtai’s collection War and Love, Love and War, translated by Peter Cole (New Directions, 2010).
Failure
1
I pray
for the failure
of this
stinking war
spread your wings
and come, merciful failure,
come
(16 July 2006)
2
Planes
rattle
toward Lebanon
diving toward
Ba’albek
to destroy
a bottle factory
3
I pray
that the plane
with a bomb in its belly
will be beaten
by the building’s ceiling
4
In the name of the beautiful books
I’ve read –
in the name of the kisses
I’ve kissed –
may the army be thwarted
5
The Gauleiter
of Lebanon
has already
promised to establish
military rule
6
When the tanks
reach the Litani River
grenades will be thrown
at them from the Ebro’s banks
7
In this war
I’m for
the villages
for the mosques
8
In this war
I’m for
the Shi’ite family
for Tyre
9
for the mother
the grandfather
for the eight kids
in the minivan
for the white
silk kerchief