‘Rock Housing Projects – Tripoli – Netanya’ & Other Poems

At Rock Housing Projects they were all refugees from big water

Everyone came on ship after ship from Libya so they sat them down opposite the ocean

Apart from my one grandpa who couldn’t bear the SS officers no more

And one day out of longing and because his guts reeled on him walked into the ocean

Thought he’d find the Land of Israel there.

At Rock Housing Projects there was a Zura midget fortune teller

That had a colander but not for making couscous

Through its holes our future would fall and the past too would filter.

At Rock Housing Projects the future was clear – why? No money, no work, no educatshun,

And yet everybody would go to the fortune teller

There are some whose future comes to them all by itself

There are some whose past turns round and comes back at them round the other side

There was this midget fortune teller there sitting on the floor on a rug

But now all the tools of her trade:

There were on the rug:

Beans, black eyed peas, buttons, wheat barley and a safety pin

And just like her there was a woman there who made

Unction and ointments, both would sit on the rug with a bottle of Arak between them

And reckon up the living and the dead, reckon without a timepiece

One day my grandmother went by her and she said:

‘Black morning’

Today your morning will be black.

That night my second grandpa died

All who hear will laugh

I’m Isaac, I did not pass there but one day of black clouds

The sun couldn’t filter, grains of light were seized like a torn string of pearls

And holes in the colander were big, so big, ginormous

And the pearls dropped through the holes, how they dropped, smithereen by smithereen

Big ones too, like beans, like black eyed peas

Round ones too like grains of wheat and barley and no safety pin

Ever managed to tie that string again

Oh the colander that tipped on me

And oh the black cloud that snatched me up

But enough of black mornings

Gathering pearls now among the rocks, in inner chambers

At Rock Housing Projects in the scale inside whose catacombs we live

And from whose windows we are falling

Gathering a few of my falls, of how I’m snatched, scraped, smothered

A ray of thick dark penetrates the air lending a light

Going down the street marking the rug with my eyes

Gathering a stub of time, joining up heaven to earth with a safety pin

And feeling for a second gathered up, the precision I will have and the timepiece

A man goes

From Damascus to Paris

If he passed through a tunnel or cut through air

That I don’t know

Suddenly he saw the East was roaming

And no central pillar was there that didn’t stir

I walked years away from Jerusalem to Beersheba

But didn’t make a travelling sack

Like Ezekiel that’s lying on his left side

In a bed in Babylon

A year of days

But his beloved died and Zion is exiled

Abraham went from Beersheba to Moriah

Three days

Tying and untying his son in his mind

Three days slaughtering and crying

We are still tied and untying

Who are the slaughterers who cry

Who the slaughterers laughing

Here everyone’s walking

And somebody already went ahead to the metropolis of the dead

Is it that place we’re headed?

Whereas I want to be quarried outside of the catacombs

Here

Until the time when there is nothing

Apart from life running the other way

A mask face and my face

Were I am man trapped in a woman

Were I a prayer in sealed tight sentences

Were the mountains of Jerusalem in Beersheba’s deserts

I’ve wandered many deserts

But never reached Moriah

Now I feel in the homeland

Suddenly I’ve cottoned on this land how much it writhes

And how uneasy its tremors

But in amongst my brethren I am lost

And some go from Iraq to America

And some from Lebanon to Nicosia

And some from Israel to Palestine

And some from Israel to Israel to Israel to Israel

But don’t find anything for Israel in Israel is missing

You who wanted to be free in your home

Make yourself a travelling sack

There’s nobody free in the world who wasn’t driven out

Am I not a girl

Am I not a woman

Driven away from a man

And there’s no mother and no father

Am I not a person deprived of a tongue

Cleared off but not in exile

Rather in my land, my kin

Being buried but not in the desert

Rather my coffin is surplus to requirement

Exiled but not far away

Rather in this dust that pents up blood and tears

Inside and chokes

A man climbs and climbs

If in tears or in vodka

That I don’t know

If it always will be so in the east

Either spirit or soil

Meantime I’ll prefer indeed to lodge inside a word

No other home as yet exists

Perchance has never been

Inside my Hebraic, myopic, Arabic,

For this is a music that is only played

My lips stir

But my voice isn’t heard

For this is the language in which big ones cursed adored and cursed

I was cleared away from it to be ransomed: a Hebrew speak Hebrew

Now nevertheless the whole East is clamouring.

There where the sun comes from we rose

And here we’re setting

On a bare trunk inside our empty instruments are hanging

Dragged there they were, and there they still hum with our tears running through them

That’s from here

But we were prisoners of hope

And now are slaves of a land and desolation