{ yesterday's tweets. }

( cut. )

( LoudTwitter )

{ Yehuda Amichai: Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms. }

Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms
by Yehuda Amichai (trans. Robert Alter)

Close scrutiny of the past.
How my soul yearns within me like those souls
in the nineteenth century before the great wars,
like curtains that want to pull free
of the open window and fly.

We console ourselves with short breaths,
as, after running, we always recover.
We want to reach death hale and hearty,
like a murderer sentenced to death,
wounded when he was caught,
whose judges want him to heal before
he’s brought to the gallows.

I think, how many still waters
can yield a single night of stillness
and how many green pastures, wide as deserts,
can yield the quiet of a single hour
and how many valleys of the shadow of death do we need
to be a compassionate shade in the unrelenting sun.

I look out the window: a hundred and fifty
psalms pass through the twilight,
a hundred and fifty psalms, great and small.
What a grand and glorious and transient fleet!

I say: the window is God
And the door is his prophet.

--

Thank you, New Yorker, for this in amongst your recent chaos.

{ Adonis: Homeland. }

Homeland
by Adonis (trans. Michael Beard & Adnan Haydar)

To faces shrunk under a mask of sadness
I bow down. To the paths where I forgot my tears,
for a father who died green, like a cloud,
a sail still unfurled in his face,
I bow down. To a child who has been sold
so he might pray and shine shoes.
(All of us in my country, we pray. All of us shine shoes.)

And to rocks where my hunger engraved a message:
This rock is really rain rolling under my eyelids, it’s lightning.
And I bow down to a house whose soil I carried with me
when I was lost. These all are my homeland. Not Damascus.

{ Adonis: Chair (A Dream). }

Chair (A Dream)
by Adonis (Trans. Michael Beard & Adnan Haydar)

Long ago I screamed at the city:
Husk of the world,
I’m holding you in my hand.
Long ago I muttered at the ship,
my song in a rose-red blaze:
all or nothing.

As for you, my grandchildren, I’m tired,
tired of myself, tired of the seas.
Bring me that chair.

--

This post was brought to you by The Girl Who is Kind of Ridiculously Into Homicide: Life on the Streets Right Now.