Two Poems

Abstract

Two Poems by Amichai Chasson Angelus Novus On Saturday nights, when the family’s asleep and the head is bettered with wine, Walter Benjamin’s voice broadcasts on Radio Berlin: “The earth constantly trembles under the feet.” My body too trembles in an inciting devotion song I sneak through the rusty gate at Ibn Shaprut, collecting Gershom Scholem from his home on Abrabanel Street from Gaza to Berlin. Benjamin’s voice follows us, materializes in the filthy passages, Anglo-Saxon Haredi men wander around in three-piece suits. Benjamin in varnished shoes, Scholem in butterfly hunter’s hat, and I in black Adidas sweatpants. The young men recoil from us, crack sunflower seeds on the sidewalks, jerk off secretly to an ad on the back page of an abandoned newspaper, creating Angels of Sabotage summoning Lilith “Come come,” building a tabernacle for the Great Crocodiles not noticing that the earth is swarming with angels clad in dresses, gentiles’ jewelry, and three toes in every foot. Their eyes wide open, their mouths gaping, their wings spread as in a priestly blessing, they try to rise from the ground up to the Star of Redemption, moving slowly like Saturn toward Jerusalem (a guesthouse for broken angels tired of ruins who at the end of their lives come to die here, angels from America, from Ibiza, from Paris, from der Himmel über Berlin). I point to the smallest among them: Paul Klee painted him with watercolors. Benjamin hung him in every room he’d lived in, after his death the chopped-winged angel was sent to Scholem’s room on Abarbanel Street. In the courtyard children now play with curly payot mumbling in Yiddish, and I translate the warnings for Scholem: Sabateans on you, Gershom Scholem, naked punks rattling their organs, old Gnostics jumping from every direction. On the way home I count us aloud: “Iron numbers up!”* No one answers, they’re all absent. Benjamin did not reach Palestine, did not land in New York, committed suicide in the Pyrenees a moment before the border could have been stolen. Scholem died childless in Jerusalem. The Angel of History is now lying in the storerooms of the Israel Museum. I saw it a week ago. This is no London or Rome, here there’s no line, no guards, I stood alone in front of the angel who asked my name, I closed my eyes. I bought a poster from the souvenir shop near the exit. Now it hangs alone in my room, the angel redeeming me from all evil will bless the woman recumbent on the couch beside me with the weekend’s newspaper bleeding in her hands: “History!” And the portrait of Donald Trump smiling in it, tanned as ever. PAUL KLEE, ANGELUS NOVUS, 1920, OIL TRANSFER AND WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 31.8 X 24.2 CM, ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM POETRY Amichai Chasson (b. 1987, Ramat Gan, Israel) is a poet, author, journalist, film director, screenwriter, and artistic director. Chasson received the Minister of Culture’s prize in 2015 as well as the Dr. Gardner Simon Prize for Hebrew Poetry for his book Bli Ma in 2018. To read a bio of Maayan Eitan, turn to page 64. Saison We go hunting at the break of dawn, the parking inspector and me, not meeting each other’s eyes. Quietly walking searching for suspicious signs: him, on the windshields me, in the obituaries. Traces appear when the thirty days of mourning are over piled up on the sidewalks: Else Lasker-Schüler lying outside the fence, Martin Buber’s beard brushing the curbstones, Breakdown and Bereavement, first edition (Stiebel Publishing, New York), Tower and Stockade in volumes of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, dedications in German. The neighborhood surrenders its assets. I sort books into produce cartons the inspector writes tickets, fixes them to the windshields on Hatibonim Street. When the hunt is over we sit down, sharing a conversation about the loot. The inspector takes Natan Zach, questions aloud: “How to sweeten days.” How else but with remnants. Translations from the Hebrew By Maayan Eitan Amichai Chasson / Photo by Moti Kikayon * Author’s note: “Iron numbers” is the name of a method for counting...