translated from the Hebrew by Mildred Faintly
Spring
And here you are again,
forgiving, coaxing, soothing—
my heart catches fire afresh.
Each spring they come to Tiberias
by thousands, to pray at the grave
of the second century CE sage,
wonder-working Rabbi Meir—
they kindle bonfires on the hills
overlooking the Sea of Galilee,
now, as they have for eighteen hundred years.
My heart’s a fire like that,
a flame defiant of time.
My covenant’s with the rocks of Israel’s hills;
my friends—fish hidden in the Sea of Galilee.
The leaves of my Bible are those on these trees,
I follow Solomon, the great magician,
instructed by demons and served by djinn.
My words are the sounds heard only at night,
it was sunlight itself that taught me joy,
my Torah scroll is the map of this land.
I cannot scold this truant spring—
I must trust this child of time, take his hand.
Night Milking
Of course the yard seemed unearthly
in the moonlight—
it wasn’t just that eerie silence,
the whole place coldly glowed with sorcery.
I ran across to the shelter of the shed
which the cow kept warm
with its bulk and its breath.
Silently I stroked
her enormous horned head
felt an occult kinship with her,
the two of us alone,
so weirdly awake.
Honi, the Circle Drawer
Today I remember the tale
of Honi, the Circle Drawer:
like a storm cloud, his sad lone life
casts its shadow over mine.
Honi, a sage from the days
when the First Temple stood,
knew how to draw magic circles
that forced the Lord to send rain.
God sent him to sleep for seventy years.
When he woke, he didn’t know how long he’d lain
in the cave, but the world he walked was now strange,
all the people he knew were long gone.
His friends were now only distant traditions,
confused anecdotes from a far-off time.
The full weight of his loneliness
finally felled him.
Like Honi, I’ve outlived myself,
while I dreamed, the world that I knew
became a dream from which
I ache to wake, too late,
none I see now see me.
I am Honi. I am legend.
More and less than real.
I am shadow. This is how it feels
to be a phantom. Like Honi
I vanish at last in the shadow
of the storms I called.
the complete poems of Rachel Blaustein, translated by Mildred Faintly, may be purchased here.