‘A Salute to the Wartime Poems of Abraham Sutzkever’ (1913-2010) & Collected Works
Photographer - Tobi Brun
A Salute to the Wartime Poems of Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010)
I shut my eyes then Bang against my ears
come you Abrásheh with most metal lines
whetted from human pith the grind of years
against their Yiddish cadence just refines
I hear you write by moonshards in the glass
with which you finally did not slit your throat
holed in that chimney Day bounced brown off brass
gives light to write to live your breathing note
I hear you hidden in Janowa's cellar
writing through days psychotic with the noose
You breathe She crosses herself, grabs my collar
to tell me Human is a thing we choose
I hear you with a gun in frozen bogs
at dark as if this Jew were now the last
real poet in Europe making song for dogs
and family cadavers of the past
I hear you gasp in the gruff liberty
of storm beating you up from chains to life
unblinking through the glades of poetry
and through the starving forest with your wife
I hear that poems are growths upon the mind
of humankind, word heroism that finds
victory in life expressed I know verse signed
by you propelled a plane through German lines
and that men do die miserably for lack
of what you kept on foot in Yiddish lines
striding in anapest and amphibrach
to live toward rescue through a mile of mines
Your verse no circumstance blackmailed away
holds the real light to our infernal flare
for making Hell a hideous cliché
People need words for when they're really there
to bite the human throat of the obscene
to go on living even if they're dead
to know that a debased word still can mean
to sing against the pistol to the head
so long as there are mothers who can weep
so long as there are fathers who can kill
so long as there are humans who can sleep
so long as there is anything to will
(I wonder what you'd make of me if we'd
actually met some twenty years ago
in Israel The non-Jew who learned to read
Yiddish to hear you And I hope I know)
Sophismos
"Since we are what we are, how could we be
other than what we are, we ask. We wander
maybe a hundred years on two feet, see
the world, then not a thing and six feet under.
We know we are not gods, though we desire
eternity. However you have died
what are we but the mastery of fire
and art and eloquence and genocide?..."
That's a damn special way of being a fool
drunk on sobriety: oblivion
turning a human to a lethal tool
smelting away the hope to say lay on,
damn times! You cannot break me to defeat me.
The only thing that you can do is beat me.
Otium
“Inaction is a horror on the mind
forever acting. And it will not stop
stopping. Your body hangs from a tree-top
standing on level ground. The moments grind
like something overdone, underrefined
upon a mantle piece. A riding crop
smacks the brain still. Gallop. Gallop. Gallop
in place. What is it that I heard just whined?”
That is the silliness of being here
against the bed with ceiling in your face
while thinking gracefully into disgrace
as sudden sweat starts chewing on the ear
and there is nothing but yourself to face,
the metonym for everything you fear.
ADHD
Will is a shattered mirror and its pieces
now cut at you like something almost done,
a hankering for genuine lazinesses
to etiolate the brain, or make the sun
appealing. But the mind is everywhere
a doorless cell where one can only run
but never flee by pulling at the hair,
and talking is like counting down from one,
wondering if insanity so sane
is anything at all. Perhaps the brain
overcooked on games, takeout, streaming binges...
It does not matter. Up to life at dawn
is not negotiable. Polish the hinges
where doors should be. "Hey Will, what's going on?"
Invitation
Come be with me and be my best
decision, quality and chance,
My first choice now, my last request,
resort, resource, breath, word and dance.
Come pluck and strum me. Make me ring.
I resonate to you alone.
Though stars should cry or sunset sing
without you, it is monotone.
Come link with me and warp my weft
and throw my endings over end.
Laugh with me. Be my Wrong and Left.
Once more unto the breach, dear friend.
Come, kiss till age between us bows
to love re-made in quantum Time,
Disnumbering all Thens or Nows
between us to a lasting prime.
Come fall for me asleep, again
feeling our private planet turn.
Who else will break both bed and brain?
Who else professes what I learn?
A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and immedicable language-acquisition addict currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Arabic, Latin, Modern Occitan, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Old English, Old Irish and Yiddish have appeared in sundry places including Metamorphoses, Blue Unicorn, Asymptote, Brazen Head, Russian Life and the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. His translation of Saint John of the Cross' "Dark Night of the Soul" has been set to music by Christopher Marshall. He also sometimes writes his own poetry if the weather in his head gets weird enough. The most important fact to note is that if you have a dog or even a tame pet fox he would very much like to pet it.
