1
What should I do
with the white here
at the hard edge of Asia,
repeatedly born and exploding
from the chalk of the curly mountain?
And who says
for the umpteenth time:
"that's how it's been
here forever"
and doesn't explain the "here forever"
rises, locks and the door
stays open behind him
2
Here's a different Levant.
Don't stoop under, don't
cross over, don't
shut the eye
placed in the valley of the eye
that bears the heroic
material, which split
from itself toward yourself.
Stand completely silent
as in mid-flight
and if you reach out
toward the small incidents
don't say any longer: I was a child, there was a fire.
"Learn your place
from the green world"
3
A man passes and says
a word
or
two and knocks
on the tree shut
within the tree
that pursues him,
clings to his clothes.
The man sings and the youth sings. The man
cries, of whom does he cry?
That's what there actually is
and there's silence
cunning of the Levant
filled with ears like a burning mat.
That's the Galilean silence that
follows the man
who told us something about
the world and ourselves and left
on some path that we didn't
think of before
4
The anarchic slope
near Peki'in projects
shapes from which no beams of a new
religion can be made.
Goats approach the
laid out table and eat
everything, even my hand
extended towards them,
turn up covered stones,
brimful with the here.
It's rumoured a wise tiger was seen
descending for a while then re-ascending
to vanish in the quarry
as a strip of light.
An hour later:
the grass is still restless
5
And what do you suggest
apart from entering
into the flax of details
and exiting?
To look
pencil in hand
(without knowing whether I'm within or without)
like a child who turns the world
over in the morning
to find his shoes
under the bed.
And this white movement hasn't
anything to stand on apart from
the virtuoso line
of the eye showing us a way
and the hand with its five
things holding on
to itself as if close to waking
6
Now, these very
days, it's time to ask:
up to where in this vivid
lost clarity
must we arrive, between
terrestrial and infinite,
in order to know
we've arrived?
What is this soft mute
anonymous thing that makes
of the trace of fire in the air --
eye, mouth, message
behind the dusty back of the white Levant?
Once again to ask:
"What of this radiant land?"
Translated by Gabriel Levin
Israel Eliraz, poet, librettist, playwright and literary critic, was born in Jerusalem in 1936. He has written 12 volumes of poetry. Since 1968 his collaboration with the Israeli composer Josef Tal has resulted in some six opera librettos and numerous other works.