Chaim Semiatitski (Khayim Semiatitsky)
The yoke is upon you, city,
forged to your stony shoulders,
for you’re hitched to hundreds of cities,
and a violent con, a flogger, holds the reins.
The sky, like a heavy sheet of tin
is hammered to your roofs;
beneath such a sky, in the cellars and tiny attics
mothers become whores, and fathers, cutthroats.
In poor quarters at night, your courtyards
lie like overturned heavy black boxes,
bits of sky, star-studded, their bitter end.
So stars twinkle like shards of glass in the trash,
as opposed to the high-noon sun.
And people move along your streets
like countless shuttles of a gigantic loom,
all with eyes looking downward;
as no one wants to raise their eyes higher than their hat brim –
all of them heading over here;
there’s no going back there.
ꞏ * ꞏ
The shtetl is now full of evening.
Women carry water mixed with sunset,
and western-gold drips into muddy gutters;
Jews go about sorrowfully, as if deep in mourning.
I’ve almost forgotten
the hour of sunset here in the city –
since people demand: give us work, give us food,
and the world is a rotten, filthy sheet of parchment.
When I see golden bracelets, like red evenings,
wrapped around thick fleshy wrists –
I hear the wheeze of lungs
within damp cellar walls.
In the city I saw a different sort of sunset:
here, earth is sky –
and the red evening – the world bleeding.
Raise your eyes to the east and behold – it’s growing light!
Translated by Miri Koral
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