***
A fear was growing
in my heart: I smelled
the putrid odor of my grave
around me. The new, silken
drapes on the door silently regretted
my coming death: Soon
we will remain without you.
How stupid that I prepare
for death with silk.
With strange sadness I thought
that I would not have any silk curtains
or even any underwear of silk
in my earthy alcove.
Suddenly I said to myself:
your limbs are like limbs carved
from ivory. My terror
dispersed like smoke.
I was sheltered from death.
translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon
I would like to write a love letter
to someone, a letter of love:
the seedling called “love” is rooted
deep in my heart.
The seedling is barbed and wild
and sown with an autumn wind.
No, my love is not a seedling:
it’s a newborn, naked and blind.
With blood and with life, the seedling
fights and fusses and cries:
its mouth searches pathetically
for a breast that is distant or dry.
Love is a hungry newborn:
it cries itself blue in the face.
Who has sown and birthed it?
Who gnaws and shreds my heart?
I would like to write a love letter
to someone, a letter of love.
translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon
My mother,
Widowed at twenty-two
And left with two small children,
Chastely determined
Never to be anyone’s wife again.
Her days and years went by quietly
As if lit by a begrudging wax candle.
My mother was never anyone’s wife again,
But through many days, many years,
Many nights, the sighs
Of her young and loving being,
Of her yearning blood,
Entered my childish heart,
Deep within me I absorbed them all.
My mother’s hidden yearning
Poured into me freely
Like an underground stream.
And now my mother’s seething,
Holy,
Deeply hidden desire
Spurts openly from me.
Anthology of Yiddish Women Poets
1928, Translated by Seymour Levitan
I am an acrobat,
and I dance between daggers
erected in the ring
tips up.
My lithe body—barely
touching the blades—
eludes death-by-falling.
They hold their breath
when they watch me dance,
and there is always
someone praying for me.
The tips shine in a fiery
circle—no one knows
how much I’d like to slip.
I’m tired of dancing between you,
cold steel daggers.
I want—my blood warming
your bare tips—
to fall.
Your eyes
A deep-green summer is in your eyes,
a summer that pulses from your warm heart,
a summer with a song in its branches,
branches that shadow darkly.
I will go where your eyes lead me,
through fields, valleys, through a dense forest
where paths are crooked and curved
and quiet darkness holds you in its arms.
