POEMS
Homework a lullaby And how will I mark the next war, I ask myself as I get ready for bed. With something tried and true, or with a new gadget? Last time, I wrote a poem and made a baby. My...
...Jerusalem...
...He would have to let it all stay behind, here, in this world which had come to fit him like his own skin...
...What other weapon have I, in all my hollow arsenal of womanness, To counter shouldered missiles, But a carried breath of life...
...My head is too small for a big bag of tricks...
...Maybe it's best I stick to the tried...
...Ruth Whitman...
...Perhaps I'll make the poem beforehand So only the baby will remain to be done...
...The red and the black ants shared the taste and therefore the fate we have long mourned together, and from the trees one, then a few, then a swarm of sweet-toothed bees joined the al fresco feast, were turned out of the gate, and like us yearn, remember, want to go back...
...we circled your hoard of diamonds your city spilled among the Judaean hills...
...Doubleday, 1974...
...Ruth Whitman, the author of three books of poetry and two volumes of translations from the Yiddish, is on the faculty of the Radcliffe Institute...
...Eva Alkon Katz Eva Alkon Katz, who lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children, was formerly an editor of genesis 2 She is currently an adviser on curriculum to the Israeli Ministry of Education...
...They commute from innocence to nuisance, and they still continue searching, haunt our picnics, and will until they find another piece of that fruit...
...The orderly hills of the ant and hives of the bee are like our towns, but even less diminished suburbs of the City of God...
...Woman's wiles...
...David Slavitt Abraham What had become very clear to him that night on the fast-disappearing summer pavements, the air thick with jasmine, the bony cats sniffing among the garbage heaps, was that he would be able to take along nothing, precisely nothing, not even the memory of his face glimpsed some morning in a mirror or the name of the woman he had loved...
...Dejeuner sur 1'herbe Assume some minimal order on the planet, some principle of equity, and grant an apple is potent as a pomegranate, and look to the bee, thou dullard, as well as the ant...
...Soon enough, in due time, perhaps in no time at all, he would have to step out beyond the boundaries of his life, crawl where there was no place to crawl, grope in the blinding light, toward a goal he could be sure of never reaching...
...1975...
...A former member of Havurat Shalom Community, he is currently studying in Korea...
...David Slavitt's latest collection of poems is vital signs: new and selected poems, published by Double-day...
...Stephen Mitchell Dan, the dust of Masada is still in my nostrils those roman stones hard and strong as the muscles of young David still press against me you led me out of that pasture of bones to deserts where orange groves lay in the arms of cypresses where drops of anemones blazed red on the hills of Galilee among the pungent vines Dan you led me to the Wall my hands were drawn to touch it my head bowed forward a force of gathered tears poured through the rock floods ran through my fingers filling me with the cries of centuries I married the Wall I became a vessel of history last night you held the city like a jewel in your hand turning each side towards me under the new moon three times you led me around your treasure (the beginning of an ancient wedding) three times Stephen Mitchell has published poems and translations of Israeli poetry in a variety of journals...
...Her translation of two poems of Jacob Glatstein appeared in our July/August REACCESS column...
...Two bites from the apple they weren't to eat, and then, in the awful moment, they let it fall to the grass of paradise where all its sweet juice oozed a rich olfactory call to our constant picnic friends...
...Only having eaten more, having gorged and finished the whole thing, they learned more than we...
...He has published the eclogues and the georgics of virgil...
...in translation, and his latest novel is the killing of the king...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
