THE WORLD AFTER GAZA ~

 

P A N K A J   M I S H R A

     Penguin 2025

AHARON SHABTAI ~

 

Tikkun

The horror

the calamity

the disgrace,

the rubble of folly

and religion's stupidities,

the dimness of vision

and violence of despair

won't be repaired by an officer,

a bomb or a plane,

and not by still more blood.

Only wisdom of the heart could mend it

only the surgeon, the doctor,

the good teacher, the teachers

the medic — an Arab, a Jew —

only the quiet traveler

riding a bicycle,

someone carrying a sandwich

and walking along a street,

someone opening their eyes,

someone who speaks with compassion,

someone listening

someone learning and wise

someone waiting and thinking

someone guiding someone

down a path of kindness, affection,

the painter, the poet,

disciples of peace —

only the gardeners of peace.

                                                                      October 10, 2023

_________________________________

Aharon Shabtai

Requiem

translated by Peter Cole

New Directions, 2025

ILAN PAPPE ~

R E A D   M E 

and new:

      Oneworld 2024

RAJA SHEHADEH ~

 

R E A D   M E

     Other Press, 2024

LISTEN ~

 

     Bernie Sanders

     Vermont

MEMORY FOR FORGETFULNESS ~

AN  ESSENTIAL  BOOK  TO  READ  RIGHT  NOW

University of California Press

YEHUDA AMICHAI ~

from Travels


I am sitting here now with my father's eyes,

and with my mother's greying hair on my head,

in a house that belonged to an Arab

who bought it from an Englishman

who took it from a German

who hewed it from the stones

of Jerusalem, my city:

I look upon God's world of others

who received it from others.

I am composed of many things

I have been collected many times

I am constructed of spare parts

of decomposing materials

of disintegrating words. And already

in the middle of my life, I begin,

gradually, to return them,

for I wish to be a decent and orderly person

when I'm asked at the border, "Have you anything to declare?"

so that there won't be too much pressure at the end

so that I won't arrive sweating and breathless and confused

so that I won't have anything left to declare.

The red stars are my heart, the Milky Way

its blood, my blood. The hot khamsin

breathes in huge lungs, my life

pulses close to a huge heart, always within.





________________________

Yehuda Amichai
Travels
translated from the Hebrew by Ruth Nevo
Sheep Meadow Press
1986

PETER COLE ~

The Prayer Book




For years I've wanted to write a prayer book.

Why? Because I've learned

that the solid hangs upon nothingness.

Because I've found that the sentence is a kind of petition.

And because I've found that in all that I've said

in all that I've said I've said only thank you.

So, little by little,

                       in fact I've written that book

and today it weighs some two hundred pounds

and soon it will celebrate its fiftieth birthday

and yesterday I bought it shoes.


Aharon Shabtai (translated by Peter Cole)







Kharja / Closure






 "Oh, I'll

love you alright;

         so

   long as you

manage to bend



   both of my

anklets

back to the

   thin silver

earrings you gave me."


(Anonymous, Mozarabic, 12th century
 translate by Peter Cole)








Palestine: A Sestina


Hackles are raised at the mere mention of Palestine,
let alone  The Question of — who owns the pain?
Often it seems the real victims here are the hills —
those pulsing ridges, whose folds are tender fuzz of green
kill with softness. On earth, it's true, we're only guests,
but people live in places, and stake out claims to land.

From Moab Moses saw, long ago — a land
far off, and once I stood there facing Palestine
with Hassan, whose family lives in Amman. (We were his guests
at the Wahdat refugee camp.) Wonder shot with pain
came into his eyes as he gazed across the green
valley between Nebo and Lydda beyond the hills.

Help would come, says the Psalmist, from one of those hills,
though scholars still don't know for certain whether the land
in question was Zion, or the high places of Baal. The green
olives ripened, and ripen, either way in Palestine,
and the memory of groves cut down rings on pain
for those whose people worked them, for themselves or guests.

"I have been made a stranger in my home by guests,"
says Job, in Hebrew that evolved along these hills,
though he himself was foreign to them. His famous pain
is also that of those who call the Promised Land
home in  another tongue. Could what was pledged be Palestine?
Is Scripture's fence intended to guard this mountain's green?

Many have roamed its slopes and fields, dressed in green
fatigues, unable to fathom what they mean, as guests.
And armies patrol still, throughout Palestine,
as ministers mandate women and men to carve up its hills
to keep them from ever again becoming enemy land.
The search, meanwhile, goes on—for a balm to end the pain,

though it seems only to widen the rippling circles of pain,
as though the land itself became the ripples, and its green
a kind of sigh. So spring comes round again to the land,
as echoes cry: "It's mine!" —and the planes will bring in guests,
so long as water and longing run through these hills,
which some (and coins) call Israel, and others Palestine.

The pundits' talk of Palestine doesn't account for the pain—
or the bone-white hills, breaking the heart as they go green
before the souls of guests-on-earth who've known this land.



————————————
Peter Cole
Hymns & Qualms
new & selected poems & translations
Farrar, 2017