An Unknown Yiddish Masterpiece That Anticipated the Holocaust Written in 1923, “In the Crucifix Kingdom” Depicts Europe as a Jewish Wasteland By Michael Weingrad
http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/04/an-unknown-yiddish-masterpiece-that-anticipated-the-holocaust/
Why has no one read it?
In a dark Yiddish masterpiece that predated the Holocaust by two decades, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg envisioned the annihilation of Jewish life in Europe. Today, seven decades after that vision became cataclysmic reality, as Jews this week observe the annual commemoration of the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah, and as the Jewish horizon in Europe darkens once again, his work speaks with fresh immediacy.
Greenberg (1896-1981) was not only one of Yiddish literature’s foremost modernists but arguably the greatest Hebrew poet of the last hundred years. If his name is unfamiliar today, that is because he inhabits a strange kind of cultural quarantine. Literary critics in Israel acknowledge his titanic stature, yet in a country that pays high honor to its writers, he has never been part of Israel’s school curriculum, and you won’t find him among the quartet of 20th-century Hebrew poets whose faces were recently added to Israeli banknotes. Nor is much of his work—including In malkhes fun tseylem (“In the Crucifix Kingdom”), which I offer here for the first time in English translation—available in English.
Raised in a Ḥasidic household in the city of Lvov, Greenberg began publishing poems in both Hebrew and Yiddish when he was sixteen. He experienced the horrors of World War I as a soldier impressed into the Austrian army, one of the few in his platoon to survive the bloody assault on Belgrade. After his return from the Serbian front to the devastated Jewish community of Galicia, he and his family were nearly murdered during one of the many postwar pogroms carried out by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. By the early 1920s, having moved to Warsaw and then Berlin, Greenberg concluded that both European civilization and the Jews’ place in it were on the verge of collapse, and that drastic steps needed to be taken.
At the end of 1923, putting Yiddish aside in favor of Hebrew, the poet emigrated to Palestine, where at first he placed his pen at the service of the Zionist left. By the late 20s, however, increasingly disillusioned with leftist ideology, he found a new home in Revisionism, the right-wing Zionist movement led by his fellow writer-activist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. For this apostasy, Greenberg was reviled by the left-dominated cultural establishment of Jewish Palestine and effectively hounded out of the country.
Back in Poland for most of the 1930s, renewing his literary activity in Yiddish, Greenberg urgently advocated Jewish emigration from Europe. His critique of the Zionist leadership in Palestine, which he viewed as both derelict in protecting Jewish life against rising Arab violence and perverse in its support for worldwide socialist revolution, found expression in an extraordinary collection of Hebrew poems, Sefer hakitrug veha’emunah (“The Book of Accusation and Faith,” 1937). Brilliant though they were, these caustic political poems sealed his fate as a cultural outlier from then onward.
It was Greenberg’s Holocaust poetry that gained him partial readmission to the Israeli canon. At the outbreak of World War II, having been warned that as a Zionist activist he was in mortal danger, Greenberg fled back to Palestine; his parents and sisters, who remained behind, were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, he gave expression to his guilt, his rage, and his agonized love for the victims in a body of poetry collected in the 1951 volume Reḥovot hanahar (“Streets of the River”). While these poems, too, have had their political detractors, they were received by Israeli readers as indispensable literary testimony to the impact of the Shoah, and within that context it became, and has remained, “legitimate” to appreciate Greenberg’s work.
That is certainly the case with “In the Crucifix Kingdom.” Written in Yiddish in 1923 just before Greenberg’s first emigration to Palestine, the poem is a nightmarish depiction of Europe as a land of Jewish agony and death. Corpses hang from the continent’s trees, its rivers disgorge the naked bodies of murdered women, its soil is toxic with Jewish blood. Europe, in the poet’s description, is a land that produces not trees but “grieftrees” (veybeymer), not towns but “grieftowns” (veyshtet). The poet imagines his mother beheaded by a mob, his father freezing to death while waiting in vain for messianic deliverance.
The poem’s indictment of Christian Europe is searing and relentless. The impossible situation of the Jews in Europe, symbolized by the maddening and ever-present sound of pealing church bells, is to have been trapped within their role as the mythical Wandering Jew in a 2,000-year-long passion play. “Through the streets they bear with joy the man from Galilee,” writes Greenberg, “Yet I am of those other creatures, those blood-sucking Jews / In tattered prayer-shawls and straps around their arms.” Like other Jewish works of art from the first half of the 20th century—Marc Chagall’s crucifixions being the most iconic—the poem appropriates Jesus and Mary in order to decry the glaring illogic of a Christian culture that worships Jews while engaging in violence against them.
But, for Greenberg, no more reliable guarantor of Jewish safety is to be found in Enlightenment liberalism: another European artifact with Jewish roots. “And now we descend,” the poet writes acidly, “we come down from the ladder /We [ourselves] fashioned and raised: the spirit of Europe. / A love, universal, even for Jew-haters.” And while the poem ends with a hopeful vision of return to the ancestral Jewish homeland, with the speaker ready to exchange his European garb for an “Arab abaya” and Jewish tallis, it also expresses deep apprehension regarding Arab hostility and the crescent of Islam that “falls / Like a scythe upon my neck.” If Europe is a ghastly dead end for Jews, their future in the Middle East, scene of the murderous Arab riots of 1921, looms uncertain as well.
Resonant with other contemporary works in its expressionism and its apocalyptic tenor, “In the Crucifix Kingdom” is one of the great achievements of 20th-century Yiddish literature and of interwar modernism in any language. The English-language reader will at points recall T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” written at nearly the same time, with its “empty cisterns and exhausted wells.” (“For so long there has been no water in the wells,” writes Greenberg, “only curses.”) In my translation, I have tried to reflect the poem’s visionary intensity, its rhythmic force, as well as its unnerving emotional register, a hunted stoicism intertwined at times with the blackest of black humor.
The poem is often described as prophetic of the Holocaust. Even were it not for Greenberg’s later redefinition as a Holocaust poet, one can understand the tendency to view it this way, what with its imagery of genocide and poison gas. (The connection is reinforced in, for instance, the video accompanying this performance of Daniel Galay’s art-song setting of parts of the poem, sung by the talented Noa Bizansky.) Yet as in the case of the biblical prophets whose mantle Greenberg saw himself as inheriting, the poem is less a forecast of the future than a nakedly honest portrayal of the present. Greenberg’s poem does not warn that a catastrophe will happen, but that it is happening now. The poem demands a response adequate to the present reality, hard as it may be to face.
If the poem speaks to our own moment, then, it is not only for its seeming prescience regarding the Holocaust but rather as a call to meet the threats arrayed against the Jewish people today. Of course, with the dramatic reshaping of Jewish-Christian relations epitomized in Vatican II and its many positive aftereffects, and with the rise in America of warm evangelical concern for Israel, it is no longer church bells that signal slaughter. Nevertheless, in Europe the streets again turn red with Jewish blood.
Notes on the Translation: In order to maintain the poem’s incantatory feel, I have tried, with a few exceptions, to follow its alternations between iambic sections and galloping dactylic ones. As for my decision to render the “tseylem” of the title as “crucifix” rather than the more conventional “cross,” the Hebrew source of the Yiddish word—tselem means image and can also designate an idolatrous image-making—allows this license, and certainly the poem describes Jewish existence in Europe as an ongoing crucifixion. Finally, in my work I have benefited from Benjamin Harshav’s translation of the poem into Hebrew, and from a typically brilliant monograph on the poet by the critic Dan Miron (an English version appears in his The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Literature).
* * *
In the Crucifix Kingdom
by Uri Zvi Greenberg
Translated from Yiddish by Michael Weingrad
A forest dense and black has grown upon the plains,
And vales of fear and pain deepen in Europe!
The tree-tops writhe in pain, in wild darkness, wild darkness,
And corpses from the branches hang, their wounds still dripping blood.
(These heavenly dead all have silver faces,
The moons anoint their brains with golden oil—)
And every cry of pain sounds like a stone in water,
While the prayers of the dead cascade like tears into the deep.
I am the owl, the keening bird of Europe’s griefwood.
In vales of pain and fear, blind at midnight under crosses.
I bear a brother’s plea to the Arab people in Asia:
Come guide us, wretched as we are, to the desert!
Terror overtakes my lambs when the half-moon falls
Like a scythe upon my neck—
My world-split heart wails in fear in Europe,
The lamb lies down with outstretched neck in the griefwood—
Wounded, world-split, I spit blood on the crosses in Europe.
(Tremble, you young and old, with heads of water in the griefwood!)
For two millennia a silence has burned beneath these trees,
A poison that collects in the abyss and festers—and I do not know
What all this means: two-thousand years of blood, of silence,
Yet not one mouth has cleared the poison spittle from its palate.
Each death at the hands of the goyim is chronicled in books,
Only the answer is missing, our answer to these deaths.
The griefwood grows so huge, and the tree-tops writhe in pain,
In wild darkness; such fear when the moon comes to look
And every cry of pain sounds like a stone in water
And the dripping blood of corpses is like dew within the sea—
Mighty Europe! Crucifix Kingdom!
I will celebrate a sabbath on a Sunday in your honor.
I will open up the griefwood and show you all the trees
Upon which hang the rotting bodies of my dead.
Enjoy, Crucifix Kingdom!
Come and gaze upon my valleys:
My wells lie empty in the waste with shepherds all around.
Dead shepherds with the lambs’ white heads upon their laps.
For so long there has been no water in the wells. Only curses.
*
You will not let us reach the sun. You murder those who try,
While the golden dream still rests upon their eyelashes.
Before the prayer for sunrise sinks into the void.
Hundreds of thousands of them run back to the griefwood
And from the eyes of sheep November peers
An evanescent gleam.
And there among the grieftrees children are born
Severity already in their blood: they wither
Even before the roses.
I will not plant the trees that bear you fruit,
Only my grieftrees are all set stripped and naked
Near you at the cross’s crown.
From dawn to dusk the bells swing back and forth
Upon your towers.
They drive me mad and tear into my aching flesh
Like mouths of beasts.
I hang my naked dead upon the branches,
I leave them there to rot, abandoned to all the constellations
That course through heaven—
In these nights of mine I fall into a dark well.
Jews that hang on crosses come to me in dreams.
I see their wild heads protruding from the windows
Of their houses
And they grumble in their wounded Hebrew:
Where is Pilate?
You cannot even see the threat that crouches by your heads.
A black prophecy pours poison in your sleep—you do not know;
Cathedral bells have robbed you of your ability to tell
When it begins.
Yet I speak to you a prophecy, the Black Prophecy:
From our valleys a pillar of cloud will rise
From our dark breath and bitter cries of pain!
Yet you will not perceive the horror in your bodies
The chatter will continue from your burning palates:
Jews! Jews!
As poison gas begins to seep into the palaces
And suddenly the icons scream in Yiddish.
*
No one is left standing. Shepherds lie stiff by trees
And rainbow colors glaze their eyes.
The stables burn. The sheep bleat madly. It blazes higher.
From all sides people carry wood to the pyre.
A little silver cross craves: Fire! Fire!
Submissively the flock comes to the field to die!
Bigger and bigger the whites of their eyes—like moons:
The grass is poisoned, in the water of the well—the plague!
Once again it is the morning after bonfire night,
Once again a tranquil night—
(A living shepherd, I flash a mephistophelean smile…)
The fearful houses stand with outlaw eyes,
With gaping wounds in all the grieftowns of the cross—
A last sheep left alive, from whom will you beseech mercy,
When your sheepfolds stand on Pilate’s land of pain,
Your pastures (bread and water) atop some smoking Etna!
*
On a wounded body a shredded tallis—the body
Is good in a Jewish tallis—so good in a tallis:
It keeps the wind from blowing sand into the gaping wounds.
A church-bell rings, the young and old grow feverish—
Cool your fever, Jews! I stand watch over the cemetery
With its open graves.
I bear the Jewish mark, a red gash upon my brow.
Ah, I am a king in a tallis of wounds and blood!
I will slaughter Shekhem and burn it down for the blood they spilled
On muddy streets,
On cobblestones,
In stables,
On the steps of churches.
Why else do they have pointed noses and grass-green eyes?
Why else do I have teeth in my mouth and a pair of knobby fists?
A ruddy hue spreads across the city walls—father,
What is it that you want to find with your silence?
It’s time to say the daily prayers.
The stars are coming out already . . . father,
Have you forgotten,
God is a watchman who keeps your flesh from shivering?!
Oh, it’s time for minḥah . . . the skies are all aflame . . . ah, father, ask for mercy!
The skies need mercy, too . . . even the skies above!
You think they don’t feel pain just as we do,
In the flesh of our bodies?
Are you dead? —I will say a name and they will sink,
The towers of the churches where they peal,
The crazy bells, and make you shake so much.
They will endure in memory alone (a story to be told)
The crosses on the steely roofs, and on the graves—
And from each graveyard, oh, by the thousands,
The Jewish soldiers will go forth with weapons
And shout a challenge to the four corners of the earth.
Does a golden circle not ascend at dawn?
Does a ruddy hue not spread across the city houses?
*
A frozen body in the setting sun—a Jew in Europe.
A house in grieftown. A city of nothing but bells and crosses,
Bells and crosses.
The embroidered curtain is gone. The door hangs off the ark:
A broken wing on a decent bird.
The head of the bird lies bloody in the ash-pot.
A penny candle glimmers red in the blackness of the ark,
In someone’s mouth, which is so dark.
My father still sits frozen facing the west
He waits for something great: to hear a shofar sound in the west:
The coming of messiah son of David, Rome in flames.
(So the casements seem to blaze, the crosses’ tips.)
It’s good for you like this, my frozen father.
Your swollen face in the redness of the setting sun.
You are like a sun.
Yet on the Christian street outside by the well
My mother stands and screams into the water down below:
Give me back my head, you wicked folk, it drowns!
What’s the matter, wicked ones? Is my head so dear to you?
The birds sing spitefully. The tree by the well,
Its apples ripe, is nourished by my mother’s screams
That start at dawn— :
Who knows where the mounted soldiers are, the savages
That dragged beautiful sisters through the villages?—
At night the rivers wail and the goyim tell of how
The stream leaves naked women on its banks.
*
Not only the tree by the well, they grow everywhere now,
Our grieftrees; though other folk feed on the fruit,
The apples that ripen on blood that they spill.
Autumn expands in the limbs of the people of Judah.
They no longer scream to the uppermost heavens.
In the valleys a scream, black as night, radiates from their bones.
The heavens are deaf and are blue. The scream never rises to God.
Yet the earth feels the misery borne in our feet,
And in kindness she speaks to our feet, saying:
Burrow, make places to sleep, leave your bodies in me,
Why wait any longer?
Nevertheless in the night a star-chorus rises and sings
And the sky is so tender, there is mercy in pain.
Except that the moon is so red that it looks more like Mars.
And Cain son of Adam falls down on his face at the threshold of Eden.
It reeks and the smell is of opium dens, of blood and of willows.
And God runs around on the snow in His uppermost heaven
And roars like the king of the beasts in the emptiness there.
And He wants to escape from His kingdom—such is His loneliness.
*
Father, what can a community of Jews do,
When God has abandoned His children, the shepherd his flock.
When autumn has entered our gardens and fog seeps into our blood.
Our home in the east is a waste land, a dwelling for jackals.
While here in the west our dwellings are gypsy tents,
Straw in the fire and chaff in the storm.
The days here are only to witness this blasphemy.
For us to stare at each other with black and swollen eyes.
At night the terror, a bird so dark, returns to its nest.
What can we do, this terrorized nation of Jews,
When the steeple of Rome towers over our heads,
And we are forced to hear bells toll by day and by night,
On our black sabbaths and black holy days.
Ah, what a curse to live out each day the way we live now:
Any minute a fire will break out under our feet,
From under the houses—
What can we do, this terrorized nation of Jews
With wives and children lamenting: woe for our lives!
And a bloody hue spreads across roof and windowpane.
How ghastly it is to grow up for nothing,
Like a rock in the street, except bodies are not rocks.
Bodies are made of flesh and blood and bone,
And feel the slice of a knife—
We’re powerless, father, to climb up the tower
And tear down the bells that are driving us mad.
To tear down the cross that stabs our copper skies—
So let us go down to the depths, father,
And dig under the earth, beneath all the foundations
And let our pools of poison seep into the globe. . . .
*
Of course I hate you all, a hate that reaches to my fingertips!
A hate that sets my limbs afire with the poison of this unsaid truth:
FOR TWO-THOUSAND YEARS TO BE THE WANDERING JEW YET NOT BELIEVE IN THE CROSS.
Three-sided is the shadow of my fear these two millennia.
Three-sided is the knife-blade of the pain that cuts my flesh.
I have wondered for so long: how can it be
That those who pray in Europe to Bethlehem
And sanctify the Bible—that they are the very beasts
Who dream of the annihilation of every Jew on earth?
The elders of our people know it better than the young:
Bright are the stars and dark the eyes:
“We live by a miracle here in the kingdom of lions.”
O true-true-true is that which my elders say:
The dead man in the church is not my brother, only Jesus.
Nor their Latin “Bethlehem” the Beit-Leḥem of my fathers.
And Mary Magdalene is not my Miryam of Magdala
With her veil of azure wool and her amphora of olive oil.
Still the hundred-thousand roar their Allelujah!
Through the streets they bear with joy the man from Galilee,
Yet I am of those other creatures, those blood-sucking Jews
In tattered prayer-shawls and those straps around their arms,
And in the year two-thousand I pour my bile out in song:
In the name of the son, this faith of millions is a lie!
Beit-Leḥem is a Jewish village!
Joseph’s son is one of us!
We Jews who dwell in Europe.
*
The fifteen million walk silently past you,
Bearing their punishment, eyes like black holes.
For ages they’ve carried a word in their blood
Yet they speak not a word to you now—
I speak to you now:
A poet and Jew in the crucifix kingdom.
With blood from their lungs, so many spit out
The griefword, the curse, and they don’t see the sun
Only moons floating white in the watery blue.
So many, so many, they go on and on
Over dry land and sea, and the wooden post too
That has one of ours bound to it
Crying out: my God, my God! into the void—
Punished, punished, the Jews remain silent
And do not say to you what I have said!
*
Of course I was born here in Europe
I grew up with you here at the crown of the cross:
A miserable willow by its private abyss,
Bethlehem was then just a story I heard,
Distant
And blue.
True, one is afraid with you here in the night:
That robbers will come through the windows
With axes and knives
To an innocent bed,
Or maybe it seems so only to my kind?
Do I dream when I hear them,
Or am I awake,
These screams for help that rise up to the skies?
To the Pale you dispatch me, from there to the seas,
From the sea to the desert where Arabs reside,
With crescent moons sharpened like scythes
For the necks of the sheep—
To the Hudson you ship me—where our brothers
Save dollars to take back to Europe, Jew money
To purchase the crown of the Slavs . . .
To Russia you drive me, the Bolshevik home
With a brother in power who doesn’t speak Polish,
And writes manifestoes to the people in Yiddish—
O homeland of pain in the Slavic kingdom!
Here is your sign for us: all of the graveyards,
Generations of Hebrews have lain decomposing,
Their bodies are nourishment for weeds and trees. . . .
So where can I go to seek out a place,
Where I will not hear you ringing your bells,
Where my eyes will not see your processions—
The only home left for me now is the depths
A welcoming gleam from the watery deep—
Yet I would not go down to the depths
While there is still dry land and bright stars.
Woe for my birth in the kingdom of Slavs
In the shadow of the cross!
*
Now is the time of the eclipse for you in Europe
It gives me some pleasure that your sun is eclipsed.
For thus does blood still flow in the veins,
The odor of sunset arises from clothes—
O your night will turn red at the crown of the cross!
Your skies that lie over the crosses, I hate them
For they are like brass and they weigh on our grief,
A burden of copper:
No rain for us here.
A curse has been placed upon fields stripped bare—
That you should endure what we have endured!
*
We eat autumn’s curse with bread from the fields.
We drink black despair with water from the well.
At night before bed we are given a serving of fear.
And so each day passes. Their fragrance is like that of willow trees
Shivering by dark rivers in the chill of November.
The owls come at night to mourn the dying of summer—
There by the river our shepherds sit dead
And the lambs run about at night in the wild
Vainly seeking a spring to quench their burning throats—
At dawn and at twilight the world is a beautiful world.
The dawn has its wonders to show, the twilight has wonders.
At night the earth and the body take pleasure from stillness.
Yet among us the old folk now rise from their beds
The darkness of night in their thoughts, like willows
In the chill of November,
In the pain of destruction.
*
Mother Mary of Magdala, how it pains me that they dragged you here,
Through streets in Europe,
Unholy Europe,
To mumble Latin in your honor.
When I enter a procession, for example,
To kiss your rose-of-Sharon lips,
And tell you
That they live
Here:
Jews,
Yes, wild Jews,
That they have wives,
That they have children,
Right here in this city,
This grieftown—
Then inevitably it happens that this skull of mine is cracked, the brains
Poured out into the street,
And they all go on with their procession—
Bloody, I pass by you, Mother Mary, and you do not know it,
And they mumble Latin in your honor.
*
Birds are flying—such is exile, this marvelous exile:
The great world with its bright and open heart:
At home throughout the world birds fly:
From the dawn runs a golden wheel
The waters of Babylon speak to our feet:
(Evening interrupts. In the air hangs a fog full of tears)
Come to us. You are an orphan. Without a home. That is your pain.
You are weary of travel. The roads go further still.
The shoreline is so vast—lie down and float with the currents
Until we reach the home of every depth and restlessness:
The great and distant sea.
So what say you, my withered father? What is your counsel, my pious mother?
Shall we obey? It is evening. The fog is full of tears.
Shall we lie down on our backs and float upon the currents
Until we reach the distant sea?
Would your eyes still stare at all the rosy dawns,
The magic sunsets, the daughters of the land?—
Yet rest, the home for all, is only there in the great sea . . .
Shall we obey?
It is evening.
The fog is full of terror—
*
The wafer is red, the host is an apple ripened on blood,
So the moons lie in the heart of the waters.
They lie that way for months at a time:
Christianity ripening.
And great is the crucifix kingdom on sea and on land.
By the rivers of Babylon what does it matter
If a channel is cut through the blood
That spurts from the roof of our mouth?
The body falls into the water, or the body is buried—
What does it matter, the feverish bodies are standing,
The living dead dressed in dark clothing,
By a pit, and the head of a woman is twitching within it.
A church rings bells when it’s time for a funeral,
A signal to mourn.
And a church has an organ to play hallelujah,
At black sabbath time in the streets, a signal to tell the destroyer
To mark all the doors of our houses with blood
The mark of Cain.
*
Of all black prophecies this is the blackest,
And yet I can feel it in all my bones.
So painful this prophecy, I suffer it always,
Each day in this Christian land of pain.
And now we descend, we come down from the ladder
We fashioned and raised: the spirit of Europe.
A love, universal, even for Jew-haters.
A kingdom of heaven for all human souls.
What a sunset, the red is so bright in our eyes:
The bonfires flare in the courtyards, some Jews
Run hither and thither, and none of them know
What to say: we are lost.
They are blind to the sunset, they ignore the abyss.
What they see is the windmill flapping its sails
Up and down in the poisonous void.
The windmill grinds wind and the wind has the odor
Of old cemeteries in the month of November.
What can I do, a traveler alone
With his Jewish blood frozen in fear
From nights of blind violence: a slaughter of sheep,
What will begin to awaken the dead,
The soldiers on Russian steppes, on Polish dirt roads,
What will make them get up and walk about
Just as they are, worm-eaten soldiers,
The Jewish dead of the Slavic kingdom.
The soldiers who died for the spirit rise only
At night, when I get into bed.
They come and approach my white bed
Just as they are, and they say: look at us,
Everyone ends up like us, everyone.
*
Ten will remain, ten wounded Jews, the bloody survivors,
To prove that our nation existed in this Christian land of pain.
Though they no longer come bloody to the gates of Rome: open!
So mysterious: that the kingdom of David has entered our blood
And this kingdom has territory in poor Lithuania:
And the kingdom dreams an obscure Jewish dream
In which birch trees are tiny and moons are huge,
And all of them melt at the head of the bed . . .
And the kingdom has grieftowns in Poland
(In the night there it often cries out in its sleep . . .)
And the kingdom possesses a wide land of grief in Ukraine
With numerous rivers where they slaughter the sheep . . .
And so on and on across the vast continent
An infinite griefland for graves to be dug
With a place for a windmill to hold up black sails:
Pleading for mercy from under the clouds
And pitching the gypsy tents of Jacob—
And the kingdom moves over the seas like the orb of the sun—
Ten will remain, with necks of sheep, with eyes like birds in fog
They will live forever, and birth children in fear:
Children with necks of sheep, with eyes like birds, with blood like roses at twilight.
At twilight a head protrudes from a window:
Its wailing pierces the stars.
*
Which red planet should I tell to hover in the sky
When the sun is eclipsed by the void of generations.
When I walk on roads and see my mothers sitting,
How they cradle in their laps their little murdered children
My slaughtered lambs,
My birds,
On the roads of Europe.
East-West-North-South—such fear beneath the crosses!
What then should I do with my good tear-laden arms?
Should I sit also by the roadside under black crosses?
And lull my lambs to sleep,
My birds,
Upon my knees?
Or should I stand and dig a cemetery here in Europe
For my dead lambs,
For my dead birds?
*
Such a sorrow-keening violin lies crimson in the clouds—
Find a corner for your prayers at sunset, father-mother.
Plead for me too, father-mother.
In the garb of Christians, your son in Europe
Is a homeless Jew,
Earlocks growing from his temples;
Well, the Christians do not see it—a sign my visage
Is covered by a fog—
Such a deep-toned mandolin is left within the fog—
Its groan of pain resounds at twilight when the stars appear.
A Jew so elegantly dressed
Walks around among the Christians
With a sabbath melody like summer.
Such a night of emeralds. The air is filled with incense
Blue opium and chamomile, frankincense and apples—
In my griefwood, wizened mother, the rising moon illumines
My dead upon the trees—
On our shoulders church-domes stand with their petrified messiah
And their silver candelabras—
*
Dress me in a wide Arab abaya, throw a tallis on my shoulder,
Suddenly my poor blood is ablaze with the once-extinguished east.
Go on, take the dress coat and necktie and patent-leather shoes
That I purchased in Eu-r-rope.
Put me on a horse: tell it to gallop and take me away to the desert.
Give me my sand. I leave the boulevards. I go to the sand of the desert.
A people is there with sun-bronzed youth, bodies naked in the blazing sun.
(No bells hang there above your head, only the constellations in motion.)
Then one of the youths of that sun-bronzed people opens his mouth in the desert silence
Burning for love, (it is twilight) . . . and he shouts to the stars: love.
And in answer a bloody blue torrent of water from the rim of the desert says:
LOVE.
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