ARAMAIC

On a night`s drive in an open Jeep
you go past signs on corrugated tin:
Rashaya, Hatzbaya, Kafraya.
As if I sail and travel
beyond times, in a living Aramaic land.
Only the field radio keeps me posted:
an escort, wounded, a chopper landing.
And someone, agitated, beset by horrors,
hurts both my ears:
shrilly, with a trembling sputter,
bungles the Hebrew.

Trans. by Tsipi Keler.

FOREIGN SNOW

Foreign downy snow falls
on the slopes of Jebel=el=Kabir,
cool and hushed it descends
on trenches on armored vehicles
across the screens of memory.
In the misty fog forgotten friends
get lost in me, calling.
friends whose lives touched mine,
now far beyond the highways
the roadblocks, the rolling machinery.
Once, among them, I happened to see
such pure whiteness suddenly crushed:
pulverized, ploughed, and rising,
then dropping and soundlessly absorbing
ripped veins and a reddening stain.

Trans. by Tsipi Keler, 1997.

THE LOST SON

He came back, but he came like a stranger
He came back, looked about and did not
Recall, for to him, all appeared estranged:
The house, the yard, the narrow lane.
Their memory sliced through his heart,
Cut, and he who survived and was favoured
Came back; and he who had sworn back there
That nothing would he forget, estranged though it be:
A dirt path, and the barren field and the ditch
At the edge, and the Lemon tree with its bitter fruit.
He felt that his absence was almost ordained:
To come back at last, to come like a stranger
With a shadowy memory that was not estranged,
And an unravelled thread of burning desire
That will never more be made whole.

Translated by Asher Harris, June 1998.

MEMORY OF MY YOUTH
for Sima and Ephy Eyal

Poetry is a sudden process
of verbal compression.
I remember well one such illumination:
her father was a famous artist
who used to load his brush
with one bullet many --
to explode on the canvas with first touch.
He drew the beautiful head of his daughter
and shook his head with pity at my sweaty pages:
I feel for the two of you,
she dosen`t know yet
that a poet is a continuous process
of the pain of existence.

trans. by Tsipi Keler.

Copyright, Elisha Porat.
All rights reserved.