Two Poems

Abstract

top photo : claude valette grossman photo : zoe grindea WORLDLIT.ORG 27 Evolution I was once a Paleolithic painter, a sensual hunter plundering the earth, living from hand to mouth. I painted at the cave’s corner, concerned only with the day’s concerns. Faithful to Nature, I rendered beauty straight and pure Sketching motion in lightning strokes, I saw nuanced shades finer than fine. I did not know of shadows Believed neither in gods nor in the world to come I lived in an Age of Actions. Then I fragmented and fissured the world into reality and beyond the visible and the hidden the mortal and the soul. Defective Evolution I sense evolution is defective no guitar sprouted forth from me where it should, my parents immigrated to the wrong country, and Paris is too far. I sense evolution is defective the fingers are too lazy to tell the gospel, Romance drowned herself in the stream, and the brackish waters demanded their due after her demise. I sense evolution is defective in those volumes of poetry, words are dragged by their hair into the green reeds and splayed across the stream, their blind sputtering verses afloat, adrift beside corpses of rock ’n’ roll, intellectuals, poets and all the others who whored themselves to adapt to the atmosphere. I sense evolution is defective on the seam that separates laptop and typewriter, My libido never awakens to the glows of a screen but paper arouses me. I sense evolution is defective. Once I declaimed poetry on stage with an orchestra Once I soared with the music. Afterward I couldn’t utter a single loveless word Afterward I knew I’d touched the loveliest thing I’d ever know and ever since I sense evolution is defective. Translations from the Hebrew By Benjamin Balint Two Poems by Hagit Grossman Hagit Grossman, a writer living in Tel Aviv, is the author of Trembling of the City (Shearsman, 2016). She has been shortlisted for the Sapir Prize, Israel’s highest literary award. Her poems in translation have appeared in the New Yorker and in Poetry International. Benjamin Balint is the translator of Hagit Grossman’s Trembling of the City (2015) and the author of Kafka’s Last Trial, forthcoming from Norton. He lives in Jerusalem. poetry ...