‘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.

‘Lucan and the Muse’ & ‘Iqrit’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Lucan and the Muse

No sweetheart, Rome's epic muse. Only her keen

cold throat could sing a suicidal queen

sublimely burned impaled. With eyes pried shut,

ears can see blood purpling out of the gut

of sworded Dido. Her unstately face

warps a last Punic shriek the flames enchase,

a backspun echo of the bastard day

the children of the One that Got Away

met Hasdrubal and Carthaginian

peace sickened to cliché. Arms of a man

warring through rains of mythos, Virgil lays

lines supple. Even the caesura plays

accents into discant patterns round the line

styling unorthodox with superfine

into immaculate. Put to occasion

new worlds of taste, paced like a good persuasion.

Intuition refined plucks at bane's harp.

Others are much more point-blank. Dark and sharp

with a horrendous sanity between

exquisite gasconades that steal the scene

at court, and history's rumble, Lucan comes

like a revenge of Muses at the drums,

most metal of all music, loud and real

battering, proud like pounding wings of steel,

battering, beating far beyond all doubt,

like something come to beat those tuning out

a mass grave chorus, chorally right and rude

to baritone an ungrieved multitude

with gusts of what it is that really blows

on mountains sanctimonious in snows,

obstreperous on glory, an honest choke

of rhetoric, his godless Music spoke

spring minds that wept at song and knew not why

to tumble in thunder from a shattered sky.

***

So no this Muse is not a gentle one.

Excessive brightness from a summer sun

helps to conceive how dark She gets you. See

a field of daysplashed flowers in Thessaly

beside the woodland where the farmer's boy

runs piping in the green and skips his toy

horse on the streams. Leaves let light trickle on water

from daylight perfect for Her Balkan slaughter

where javelined soldiers wriggle, a boy begs

hacked dad to live and tree-roots snap the legs

of horses who went mad where riders fell.

Her language is the charm of weathering hell

to Man's savannah beast. At her Lucan best,

she's striking as a pilum through the chest

till the heart skips all beats. Gods know where

men got off calling this trick goddess fair.

She is as fair as life has been for most

humans who lived. A sheer Nobody's Ghost,

She stalks in warpaint and a cloak of scalps

to simper Latin as troops hurt on the Alps

in Fate-black humor, redpills you with bodies

dyed in the bright full moon whose face she bloodies.

At Her yoke, feral eras synchronize

under chill stars that scribble on gaped eyes

frosty sharp canticles of humans felled

in dynamos of regimes born, bled & knelled,

till fluent dread of things to come again

is scratched in proverbs on the tender brain.

She strolls to Rome with weird gems on Her fillet,

winks caustic pride at soldiers in the billet,

then trolls at court, bows

crooked, smiles perverse

at Caesars, and haunts docti into verse

singing the victories & aftermaths

with eyes that know the gods are psychopaths.

Of men's deeds, goddeſſe, ſing; of tryumphe ſtrucke

till the heart marvels what the actual fuck

***

To be the Muse's darling, come like Lucan

bemused in the best court a man could puke in,

dream canceling dream. His role unspooled life's roll

for Her. The murderous varier of the soul.

Nero did read him. From the first, it's blood

he wrote in. Flipped out spectacles and gluts

at court churned the grotesque to a lofty mood

for epic where men jagged each other's guts

sans gods or heroes. No such fey disguise

fit his rank Muse in gnarly Thessaly

who paid neronic price for sanity

watching psychosis blow through open eyes.

Art made the artist. Hideously wiser

each day to autocrats' gushes and kinks,

his jiggering plot boiled over in a plot on Caesar

at twenty five. As no throne-squatter thinks

of pardoning the treason of the sane,

he rendered unto Caesar from his vein.

Rome's epic muse is not a poet's wife.

Of Lucan, She asked little. Just his life.

Iqrit

A ruined church upon a hill

lies in today's debris.

I watched an old man praying outside,

with nowhere else to be.

No majesty distracted him.

Only the olive trees

bent as he bent on buried ground

in silence on his knees.

(I'd say "he had unusual eyes,

a voice like an abyss..."

But there is more than poets' lies

to what a person is.)

I had not come to press him for

his life, or even name.

But hearing my ṣabāḥinnūr

he told me all the same.

Much old Arabian verse laments

campsites with nomad love.

Triteness is just the truth of hearts

and homes compelled to move

as men mourn prints in blackrock sand,

weep over stones and roam.

This man had come to mourn his land

without a home at home.

A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Occitan, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian and Yiddish have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.