Three Poems

Agi Mishol


The Sermon at Latrun

You piss on my love as if
it were a bonfire, extinguishing it
ember by ember with the arrogance
of the perfect crime, and afterwards
you cry at night in front of an empty robe,
a shirt on a barbed wire hanger—
What were you thinking?

So your carriages turned into pumpkins,
your horses to mice,
and rags began peeping through.
Both of you, covered in fig leaves,
biting into the apple of knowledge,
knowing how to enter and exit the norm—
Were you not afraid?
Did you never hear that God
has no God?

You will be wanderers in the cash flow
of life, dogs without collars.
You will never relax into form,
never again hear the heart go boom—

A pig's head resting on a tray,
a green apple stuffed in its mouth—
With this you remain—
So sayeth the Lord.





Night Lamp

It takes time for the body
to grasp what the mind has decided
so the body strokes itself
with an outline of consolation:
here the shoulder, here
the face, here the inner thighs—

This is the bottomless sigh
devoid of a consonant
to lean against.





Betrayal

All the sorrel stalks I sucked on
revealed nothing.

Words piled up behind my back
until they turned into a green hill.
Phloem coursed through the trunks;
lupine seeds plotted blue in the dark soil.

Even if there is no singular form for grass
and only the plural makes it green,
I could not have known.

Birnam Wood began to move,
afterwards thought darkened
with everything that lay behind the trees.


 

translated from the Hebrew by Joanna Chen

Read the original in Hebrew

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Agi Mishol is an established Israeli poet who has won an array of prizes, including the Yehuda Amichai Prize, the Prime Minister's Prize, and the coveted Dolitzky Prize. The daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Mishol was born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1946 and emigrated to Israel at an early age. Her work has been translated into a number of languages and she has published more than a dozen books of poetry in Hebrew. Look There was published in English by Graywolf Press. Agi Mishol directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv. She recently appeared on Transatlantic Poetry with Marie Howe and is the recipient of the 2014 LericiPea Poetry Prize.

Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and literary translator whose full-length literary translations include Agi Mishol’s Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2016), Yonatan Berg’s Frayed Light (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2019; a finalist for the Jewish National Book Awards), and Meir Shalev’s My Wild Garden: Notes from a Gardener’s Eden (Penguin Random House, 2020). Her latest translation, Hadassa Tal’s But First I Call Your Name, is forthcoming this year with Shearsman Books. She teaches literary translation at the Helicon School of Poetry and regularly contributes interviews and lyric essays to The Los Angeles Review of Books blog. You can find more of her work in Guernica, Narratively, and Mantis, among others.