Rachelly Abraham-Eitan

 

Man, earth and tree in the emerging city

(Hebrew original posted here)

 

Snakes of aviation writhing on the dark highways slowly swallow

Green lungs. Motorized toys, the latest models,

Speed along dark carpets. The earth is casting off its vegetation

Wearing an asphalt shroud and houses behind walls that block out Soot and noise and sobbing that rises in the throat and remains

Like smoke choked between the gloomy divided buildings,

Devoid of roofs and plaster

White dust rises everywhere on the outskirts of the emerging city

A train rumbles into the heart of the city. People emerging from it Are swallowed up by the elegant mall.

Shelves of books and a crossroads of opportunity.

I write the tears

That well up wildly inside me.

A thwarted, thwarting poem, observing,

Questioning like an innocent who knows not to ask

Or learn anything wise, to speak

And to scorn, to build a place for poets in the city of the future,

To break  through time,

Through the human spirit, to calm the blood, attacking

And grief-stricken in face of the sickness, the pain that tablets

Do not assuage, the fear of loss, of remaining alone

Beautiful structures emerge: cultural center, synagogue, pool

And lake, garden and park. A separate park was created for dogs

Where humans wouldn’t bother them,

Wouldn’t disturb their doggy bliss

The city’s poets also seek a place to gather together, to poetize

Launch books, clink glasses, escape from their sad desks

Loaded down with suffocated poems, melting like tears  

Who cares about choking, sobbing poems?

Who cares about fading poems?

Let us not throw them away like leaves in a grey season 

In the hands of the architects of time and books

The poem loses itself and passes over the doorposts of the houses

Many stanzas are written

The poet was invited to read her poems at a festival

Blessed are your houses' inhabitants and readers and destroyers,

They will be blessed. Selah.

A rock is ground up by a bulldozer.

It crumbles and fades like a man at his path’s end.

The poem’s stanzas are ground up in the pain of childbirth

The ancient carob tree sheds its dusty fruit before being uprooted

From its life path. Soon it will assume an asphalt shroud

And bridges will disappear into the distance.

Upon them cars and trains will speed

Like days, like the toy bicycles of tomorrow’s children – the drivers Of a new dawn.

And when they grip the steering wheels of time,

What of the remnants of trees

And how much water will flow through the rivers and lakes

Of human awareness?

 

And what of the poet? She remains afraid to touch

The deepest wound in the blood

Afraid to dig like a bulldozer finely grinding up rocks to dust

Afraid of the fear of being frightened in a thin, disappearing voice. The festival begins

But still she is here, sobbing herself to oblivion.