There the northern sea, foaming quicksilver
here between your walls
sheltered from every measureless wind
I shake with you, shred of sister land.
Ghetto. What vile name you were given.
With ignoble universal shame they baptized and branded
your upright body and scattered it like grains of sand
in a desert of the soul. How infuriating!
Small shred of foreign land, I the forest crown you with Life
You tremble, remembering, and lacking a country I link arms with you.
On four legs we walk down streets with polite names
the Street of Bread, Rector Street and Bridge,
and Hill Street further on still.
Sorrowfully I follow the call of your ridge
not forgetting the dark violence done you by the final solution.
It battered down your doors, overturned your sacred sites
forced your people to be wanderers without a country.
Too weighty a story.
You burn with fever and I shiver with you
in this winter engraved on the mute crystal bell.
If you have to shout, do it.
I hear you, small shred of land, my friend. With Life I crown you.
I follow the call of a serpent, plastic with minute lights inside,
a banal thing left up after New Year’s Eve, or a promise of the coming Carnival,
covering the corners of houses with rounded roof-tiles, making them shake
and like an umbilical cord
joining me to you.
I ask myself: how can you get on, among antique books and chipped beliefs
with the unmatched thin-glassed chalices all line up?
How can someone so refined get along
with this fake story sprawled in musty lace armchairs?
What do you say when you smell the fat presence of fraud?
February lords it over the village streets and washes the worn stones.
The waxen moon rises over the black, drool-spitting sea.
Under the cast-iron sign
the tinkle of red lanterns announces fragrant spring rolls.
Splinters of laughter are scattered in the night.
We two, shred of land,
creatures of the same chimera mother, smile up our sleeves;
we desire wine and celebration,
because I forest
mirror myself in your face, sister, and crown you with Life.
translated by Brenda Porster