to this site
At Holon's Cemetery, after we die
At the window we shall sit, you and I.
What happiness! The silent hours!
And you will be mine, and I will be yours.
We shall remember, but say no word
Of all the suffering, of all that occured.
Years of light of an afternoon endless.
An eternity comes, another one passes.
The river of Lethe, black-green, by and by.
At the whole universe, only you and I.
Jerusalem
High above you soar
Among the happy stars,
In the light-drunk orbits
Of worlds not-to-be-known.
Flowers at your forehead,
Of crimson and velvet
Your prophets' drops of blood
Frozen into your crown for ever.
Not even a grain of dust
On the city-walls.
Your olives and palms
Sent their roots into celestial spectra.
There is no path in the hills,
Nor in the sea, leading to you.
Only a heart lost in pain
Will maybe find the way.
Your towers, still ablaze
In fire and gold, burn in your memory,
And the son of Jesse, in your palaces
Still calls for God, from the depths.
Amoz's son, the seer
Sees still Him sitting on the Chair,
And the one from the Galil, still bleeding
Stoops under his brown-gilt cross.
Smiling softly, you soar and pass
On the wings of Seraphs and Cherubs,
High above yellow Asia's plains,
Above Europe's towns of smoke.
High above the lands of the nations you hover,
That curdle in the dusk, like huge, heavy animals,
Suddenly and sometimes gnashing their teeth at each other
Only to sink again into their nameless dream.
You are born from the earth, high above the rivers
Of Babylon, full of fears,
Towards the spiky hills of Spain,
Towards the darkest German forests.
They won't see you, look at you,
The gnawing beasts, buried in their papers,
But the ocean, with its green peal of psalm
Will bear to you its richest Hosannas.
Look down on us in mercy, Flower of Heaven,
Haven on earth to our suffering mankind,
Bearing its low burden under pain,
Fatigue, evil and folly.
Have on me too mercy,
A guest in your world for an hour,
A lonely wanderer on the desolate ways
On the night-strewn paths of the soul.
