Since they hid your body in the mountain,
every day I am buried with you in the mountain.
There, near the wall,
with white paper squares floating from wall to wall.
Hidden among the stones and clods of dust,
both of us climbing tiny cardboard steps,
and the blood does not stop trembling
in our thoughts, our desires,
our imaginations, our whims, or even
just between the fingers of our hands,
on our necks,
on the soles of our feet.
The sun dreams us and
all the miracles too.
Handsome, shadowy, wrapped
in the bowels of the earth,
inside the mud,
going over the limit,
there we continued to live with all our might,
there we continued to die with absolute naturalness
without a living soul in the world
except for us,
with all the wonders of the universe that continue there: the sky the sun the wind
the water. With very small white clouds, strange. With the thunder, the tower
the twilight,
wildflowers on the face of the sunrise,
mites caught up in the confusion,
accidental passers-by.
While listening to the barks of the dogs
that appear behind
Routine. I say routine.
Everything returns to routine:
the beauty, the thinness. Your breaths.
My lips touching your breaths.
With festive birds circling above your breaths.
With not losing touch with your breaths.
With your eyes. With the lightning in your eyes.
My lips touching your eyes
the lightning of your eyes.
Where is the lightning of your eyes rolling.
Your eyes. Like two wounded animals
taking pleasure on my belly.
With the time that continues to pass slowly
shattering your eyes
your eyelids
your forehead
your nose
your nostrils
your mouth
your teeth
your neck
your throat
your hair cropped almost to your scalp.
My lips touching your eyes. Your eyelids. Your forehead.
Your nose. Your nostrils. Your mouth. Your teeth. Your neck.
Your throat. Your hair cropped almost to your scalp,
with the blackish, thorny whiskers—
like weeds on your cheeks.
My lips touching the blackish, thorny whiskers—
like weeds on your cheeks.
My lips touching your cheeks.
Oh Migo.
Colts run in my dream.
I mean your smiles.
My lips touching your smiles
like then, when we danced together, barefoot and wild, there,
at the turn,
at the corner,
next to the wall,
around the wall,
beyond the wall,
in empty parking lots,
on public benches,
on train tracks,
in malls,
in all kinds of stadiums.
Gazing and wondering what next what next what next
I say wholeness—
the quiet. The continuity. The meaning.
With doing nothing—nothing nothing nothing—
only to gather my arms around you,
to put my arms around your neck.
My lips touching your neck,
your cheeks,
your chin,
your shoulders.
With the cold sweat on your shoulders,
on your hips,
on your thighs.
With the softness of your thighs.
My lips touching your thighs.
The fingers of your hands yellowed from so much nicotine.
The cold sweat between the fingers of your hands,
with the smell of nicotine on your clothes.
With your clothes,
without your clothes.
Naked below the clods of earth
behind the last door,
near the glass windows facing the boulevard,
the two of us lie side by side.
Breathtaking like at four twenty before sunrise,
the twenty-first of September,
1975,
then,
when everything was clear
and pure
and rare
and innocent
and loved
and aglow
And it seems, the world is on its way
and we are on our way.
And what melancholy beauty.
And in the place nearby,
not far from where we are,
under the white trees,
toward the lit streetlamps,
with small handclapping
that continued coming
from all sides,
with the dream of the two of us
Oh Migo,
we are both eternal.
Always we were eternal.
Always I knew we are eternal.
Mighty and glowing, where the flowers flower,
the two of us waiting now for sunrise
And the quiet immortality,
the one who doesn’t take his eye off us
—the one we always talked so much about—
with the drunken earth bowing its head in yearning,
beginning to hallucinate
With the immortal flowers growing freely,
I mean really freely,
around you
around us
around me
Around You Around Us Around Me
Hedva Harechavi
translated from the Hebrew by Linda Stern Zisquit
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Rana, the first book of Hedva Harechavi’s trilogy-in-progress, was published in 2014. Migo, the second volume in the sequence, was published in 2017. Migo is Harechavi’s seventh poetry collection, and it is dedicated to her son Elisha, nicknamed Migo, who died in 2003 at age twenty-eight. In language that goes to the edge of pain, Harechavi crosses hidden boundaries between life and death and creates a world of inordinate love.
Two striking elements in the deeply moving poems of Migo are the relationship between mother and son and the music of Harechavi’s language, which is one of vitality and yearning. Migo explores the many ways in which loss takes on life through memory and is made alive again through its intensely exploratory and rich music. The power of Migo, which Harechavi began writing in 2008 and completed in 2016, is in the border collapse between life and death, between a living mother and a dead son. It is a book centered on mourning, but it is not a book of lamentations or bereavement. When listening to Migo, one encounters the call of the mother to her son. The force of this call is located in the sharp contrast that exists between addressing a living and breathing person with the expectation of hearing him speak, and addressing a silent object that cannot be heard. Harechavi journeys to the edge of language—the edge of yearning and suffering—and creates poems in which mother and son live and exist together in the same reality.
Two striking elements in the deeply moving poems of Migo are the relationship between mother and son and the music of Harechavi’s language, which is one of vitality and yearning. Migo explores the many ways in which loss takes on life through memory and is made alive again through its intensely exploratory and rich music. The power of Migo, which Harechavi began writing in 2008 and completed in 2016, is in the border collapse between life and death, between a living mother and a dead son. It is a book centered on mourning, but it is not a book of lamentations or bereavement. When listening to Migo, one encounters the call of the mother to her son. The force of this call is located in the sharp contrast that exists between addressing a living and breathing person with the expectation of hearing him speak, and addressing a silent object that cannot be heard. Harechavi journeys to the edge of language—the edge of yearning and suffering—and creates poems in which mother and son live and exist together in the same reality.
Hedva Harechavi (b. 1941 in Kibbutz Degania Bet) is an Israeli poet and artist. She has lived most of her life in Jerusalem. Her first poems to appear in print were published in the Hebrew daily Al-Hamishmar, and had been submitted by the eminent Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg. Goldberg later selected and prepared for publication Harechaviʼs first book of Hebrew poetry, Ki Hu Melekh (Because He Is a King, M. Nyuman, 1974), which received the Rachel Newman Poetry Prize that same year. 2008–1962 Tsipor Sh-bifnim Omedet Ba-ḥuts (A Bird that is Inside Stands Outside: Poems, 1962–2008) was published in 2009 by Kibbutz Hameuchad and the Bialik Institute. Rana: Shirim, 2005–2012 (Rana: Poems 2005–2012), the first book of a trilogy, was published in 2014 by Hotsaʼat HaḲibbutz Hameuḥad. Migo: shirim 2008–2016 (Migo: Poems 2008–2016), the second in the sequence, was published in 2017, by the same publisher. Harechavi won the Prime Ministerʼs Prize for Hebrew Literary Works in 1982 and again in 1992, the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Poetry in 2010, the Ramat Gan Prize in 2011, the Akum Prize for Poetry in 2013, the Bialik Prize for Hebrew Literature in 2014, and the Leah Goldberg Award in 2020.
Linda Stern Zisquit has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently Return from Elsewhere, which was the co-winner of the 2013 Outriders Competition (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014) and Havoc: New & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and the chapbook From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter (New Walk Editions, 2019). Her translations from the Hebrew include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press, 1997) for which she received an NEA Translation Grant and which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award; Let the Words: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow, 2006); and These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam (Toby Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. Zisquit was born in Buffalo, NY, and has lived in Israel since 1978. She is a retired associate professor of poetry, and for many years she was poetry coordinator for the MA program in creative writing at Bar Ilan University. She founded and runs Artspace Gallery in Jerusalem.
