Look at the pictures, look at the pictures
watch the videos, watch the videos,
read this, smell this, touch this,
enter the installation, enter the exhibit.
Faster! Fresh videos
at the break of dawn, videos
at work, and videos uninvited
to your phone.
See this one of a policeman
at a demonstration,
and this one, of cops facing a woman.
Have you seen the one on the news?
They only showed half of it,
look at all of this, watch it all!
Read the testimonies
(tough to read)
watch the award-winning movie
(tough to watch)
listen to the podcast
there must be more statements,
some are unbelievable, this is
what’s left for us, to listen, our duty.
Did you see the interview?
And the one on the other channel?
Open the pictures with trigger warnings,
watch the film about that girl,
you’ll hear sobbing (from the screen
or yours?)
Open your heart
open your wallet,
breathe the smoke,
Put everyone in their beds,
right now! Fall asleep
over the picture of the child.
How child amputees smile,
and how fast a building collapses
into itself, like a pile of dirty laundry.
We’ve learned to distinguish among helicopters by the noise
and cast down our faces with a sigh.
We’ve learned that what happened to us happens every day,
to people whose names are foreign and tongue is strange.
We’ve learned that somewhere, every hour, a child leans on a suitcase.
We’ve learned to concede. We’ve learned that our fate, no matter where,
is only in our hands, that love is not enough.
We’ve learned that while necessities
line the shelves at the supermarket, we’ll be fine.
We’ve learned to grasp reality TV, to cry over the disabled children
as we do over a teen who didn’t make it to the next level.
We’ve learned to go to work.
To cease to hope. To repeat
what we’d do if only we had no children.
What would we do, the streets are so hot
feet burn in sandals.
What would we do, the sewer overflows at every news bulletin.
What would we do, we’ve learned to look death in the eye and know
that it’s our eye, that it’s always watching,
that death has crossed over to this side.
Our hands stretch, they are green,
we crawl over the ruins, enormous
lizards, tongues licking
stones, large animals, we were created
first.
A tail strikes at electric poles,
our pupils dilate, our eyes are red,
our crawling bellies chafe the top
of the rubble.
It isn’t unpleasant.
We crawl and aren’t particular
about chewing pebbles
and displaced rocks.
The support beams,
once homes,
the ruins quench
our enormous thirst.
Our molars work without pause,
the ruins that only yesterday
were bedrooms and doors,
are now gravel in a full belly.
Sometimes we vomit and then swallow
what’s left of the ruins
again.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Wolfgang Mattheuer. Die Ausgezeichnete [The Excellent] (1973/74). Materials: Oil on fiberboard. Dimensions: 170 x 130 cm. Source: Neue Nationalgalerie, Foto: Klaus Göken © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023.
Wolfgang Mattheuer’s works often suggest a kind of “heroic pessimism”. Almost as if they were telling what really happened to the brave, muscular good-looking and healthy characters on East German and Soviet posters. But in Die Ausgezeichnete, the character has been rewarded, their excellence has been recognised, and yet, her ambiguous expression suggests mostly weariness.
Translator | Lisa Katz
Lisa Katz is the translator of Hebrew poets Admiel Kosman (So Many Things Are Yours, 2023, Approaching You in English, 2012, both Zephyr Press), Miri Ben Simhon (The Absolute Reader, Toad Press, 2020), Tuvia Ruebner (Late Beauty, Zephyr, 2017) and Agi Mishol (Look There, Graywolf, 2006). She taught translation most recently at Ben Gurion University (2024-2025), and has served as an editor for the Rotterdam Poetry International web site for work in translation (2003-2023), and translator in residence at the University of Iowa MFA program (2017). Since December 2023, she has been teaching literature in English to 10th and 11th graders at the Max Rayne bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) high school in Jerusalem, as a volunteer.
Author | Yael Statman
Hebrew language poet Yael Statman (b. 1984) is a developmental psychologist. She has published two books of poetry in Hebrew: Concerning that Burning (2020) and Quiet Outside (2023); her third, Soft Objects, is forthcoming in 2026. Her output has soared since the October 7 war, her poems appearing regularly in newspapers and literary journals in Israel, including the widely circulating culture sections of the weekend editions of the Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz newspapers. With irony, awareness of her privilege, and an inability to avert her gaze from Gaza, in her most recent poems Statman portrays the dissonance that is one of her tropes now. In English translation, nine of these poems have been published in a very short space of time: in the scholarly journal Nashim, #45 (Spring/Summer 2025), the National Translation Month’s annual online project on Substack (September 15, 2025) and here in the April 2026 The Bombay Literary Magazine #63.
