Two Poems

Abstract

fathers and mothers. They had all crowded in one place, an unholy assemblage of ghosts auditioning to be an allegory of triumph of the human spirit, pretending to be together in eager anticipation of a shared miracle of love when we were actually praying for jobs, insurance, and pension plans. Wearing his formal religious vestment Lukas, along with a small choir, boarded one of the trawlers, which took them in deep water. I couldn’t hear my father, but I knew he was reading from the first chapter of Saint Mark’s gospel. I stood motionless on the shore as if posing for a portrait with the blankness of a scarecrow, in anticipation of his cue to release the white dove I cradled. Lukas raised the basil sprig in his hand, sprinkled the sea, and tossed the cross. The divers flung themselves in the air and plunged into the sea. They wrestled to troll the cross, churning the water, a formless colony of gulls submerging their heads to groom themselves and catch fish. Then the men vanished. Entirely. As if they ceased to exist as visible forms. Some thought at first that it must have been a sort of visual deception, and that for a brief moment they were completely incapable of noticing what was happening before their eyes. They stood silent, looking at my father as if floored by his abilities to make appear and disappear. But the longer we expected the divers to resurface, the surer we were that something was terribly wrong with the world around us, as if we were at once dreaming and waking quietly from a troubled sleep. The vessels started to sink. We weighed all the possible explanations as quickly as we could and screamed. It was a horrible noise, the sound of a sickening wind punctuated by the thin squeak from something that sounded like a clowder of maniacal cats, but it was more as if suddenly you could hear through walls from another world, the suffocating closing down of reason. Men and women jumped into the sea trying to locate the bodies of their loved ones, but the sinking trawlers stopped them. No one will tell our story. No one will bear the listening : what we found down there laying on the blue depth of the sea floor, instead of trawlers and men, were dozens of fishlike species never seen before. Our suffering will never be a story of loss—it won’t teach you anything. It will be the slow shake of the head: our kinship with the sand filling up with ants, like a local orchestra of unpeaceful mourners singing for the dead flies they are carrying. The history of grains wishing they could flow against the wind. Athens Two Poems by Eli Eliahu Crossroads All winter I didn’t write a poem, and I didn’t remember even one dream that I dreamt. I left a house and a wife, rented an apartment, and everything I needed I found discarded along one road or another: bed, table, shelves, refrigerator. It’s possible to say that this was a wonder, an act of angels, as I stood at a crossroads. It’s also possible not to think about it too much. I cannot know a thing about life’s questions, or to estimate what I found and how much I lost. But all that winter I didn’t write a poem, and I didn’t remember even one dream that I dreamt. Simple Thing There is no simple thing – from olive branches do not make clubs. There is no simple thing at all – from discarded stones do not build a wall. There is no clarity in ease. Where the house stood there is a little mound of dust, and from the dust we came, as they say. It is no simple thing to walk in another’s shoes. But sometimes it seems that you truly remember: the sheep, the mosque, the well. Translations from the Hebrew By Kevin Haworth Eli Eliahu (b. 1969) is an Israeli poet based out of Ramat Gan. He has published two highly praised books in Hebrew, I, and Not an Angel (2008) and City...