Frayed Light - Yonatan Berg Wesleyan Poetry Series

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56 Inverted Sacrifice (Isaac) 58 Rivka 59 Rachel 61 Yocheved 62 Job 63 The Prophet Devorah 65 Judah the Maccabee 66 Jesus 67 Babel: The Immigrant Speaks 68 The Khazar Kingdom 69 Martin Buber 70 Rosa Luxemburg 71 Golda Meir 72 Hannah Arendt, Jerusalem 1961 73 My Father, Meir Berg 74 My Mother, Shoshana Oppenheimer-Berg 75 Part V | HUNGRY AND SURGING 77 A First Encounter with Death 79 Samaria 80 Parting the Sea 82 Report from a Free City 83 Interlude 85 Red 86 Dana 87 Interim Report 88 Love 89 Walking 91 Epilogue 92

      Part I

      HANDS

      THAT

      ONCE

      HELD

      MANNA

      In conversations I cannot explain myself—still

      an erupting mass of arrogant youth: fruits of conflict

      with the body, an overflow of zeal trapped

      inside, a decisive lack of seriousness,

      traits acquired when I left

      the grim corridor, too brightly lit with mitzvoth.

      The constant urge to touch, I know,

      means always to be thirsty.

      I’m embarrassed by nudity, weeping, moments

      of pure stupidity, gatherings with a family

      that only asks to be left alone.

      I try, time after time

      to talk to the boy I could have been—

      the engaged one, the generous, self-controlled one who pauses

      before opening doors, allowing the dogs to run wild into the future.

      They bark, my faithful friends of heresy,

      of despair and self-denial, forever running inside me

      with crude enthusiasm. Now, so it seems,

      it’s too late to change, too late

      for caution. How I love the sound of glass

      hitting the floor of the room, yes, you know it—

      pushing through the midnight gate and beyond

      to the flat surface, the silvery one,

      the tired pipe organ of creation.

      I apologize to each and every one of you

      that I cannot touch, cannot reach out

      to ease your pain, cannot hold you to me,

      knowing I will ruin it all by saying something about the self—

      something too flowery, too sophisticated. That being the case,

      this letter becomes one blurry trail

      of what, at day’s end,

      I really wanted to whisper in your ear.

      We travel the silk road of evening,

      tobacco and desire flickering

      between our hands. We are warm travelers,

      our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

      in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

      We break bread under the pistachio tree,

      under the Banyan tree, under the dark

      of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up

      in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel

      in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices

      announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops

      heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,

      with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,

      traveling with ardour in our loins, with the cry of birth.

      We sit crossed-legged within the rocking

      of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells

      of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel

      through

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