Two Poems

H. Leivick

The Holy Poem

With my holy poem
Clenched between my teeth
From my wolf cave—my hole, my home—
I go out and I roam
From street to street:
As a wolf with a wretched bone
Clenched between his teeth alone.

There is prey enough in the street
to sate a wolven hate,
and sweet
is the humid blood that drips
from flesh, but sweeter still
is the dry dust settling
down on jammed lips.

Struggle on the street,
The call of throats.
Let me this once come out tonight,
A deathtooth bite.
That bite is me.
But I don't come to gnaw.
I hunch into my little self
With head beneath my paw.

Back to my hole I head
And lump onto my bed,
But I am awake,
Untired from holding clenched
Between my teeth alone
This holy poem
As the wolf his wretched bone.





Gates, Open

Gates, open! Draw closer,
Threshold! You'll tell.
I come once again
To my snug little cell.

My body—fire,
My head—snow;
And on my shoulders
A sack of woe.

Goodbye. Goodbye.
Hands. Eyes. That day.
Farewell on the lips
Burnt out—burned away.

Farewell to whom?
Fled whom? What past?
The eternal questions . . .
This time do not ask.

In fire, in flames
The steppeland spreads,
And snow in the flames
On the mountains' heads.

Look what doors
Are open to me!
Hospital or prison?
Or a monastery?

I lay down at your feet
My sack of woe,
Land Colorado
Of fire and snow!

translated from the Yiddish by A. Z. Foreman

Read the original in Yiddish

Listen to the original read by the translator:

“Gates, Open” is the first poem in Leivick's book Lider Fun Gan Eydn: 1932-1936 (Lyrics from Eden: 1932-1936), a collection of poems written during a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Colorado a few years after his return from the Soviet Union. The steppes of Siberia and of Colorado are fused and confused. Part of the poet is still in the snow of exile, even as his body is in the flames of tubercular fever in Colorado. The poem calls to mind the ninth part of his long cycle In Snow about his Siberian experience. In that poem, he comes to a gate and asks to be allowed in, to warm himself from the freezing cold, but is denied after people ask who he is and why he is on the road. Here, after having door on door shut to him, as a Russian Jew, as a political prisoner, then again as a Jew rejected while freezing his way through Siberia, he finds the gates and doors open to him in America—a country that he came to love probably more deeply than any non-immigrant ever could. But what do these gates and doors in “The Land Colorado” lead to? Life or death? Unknown. As he survived the snow of Siberia, can he survive the tubercular fire here in Colorado? America is also where in the end he is to lay down his burden, his zak mit geshrey, the sack of ache and screams he has borne on his proverbial shoulders. The first line also calls to mind the Nileh, the prayer recited on Yom Kippur, which reads psakh lonu shaar b'eys nilas shaar ki fono yoym [open to us the gates at the time of closing gates wherefore the day has turned]. The referent is the gates of heaven, which are about to be closed, but the supplicant asks that they be open for just a bit longer to receive the final prayers. Here, however, he asks the gates themselves to open, not God (as in the prayer) or any corporeal resident (as in In Snow) to open them for him. The celestial is supplanted by, transformed into, the terrestrial. The original text expresses a hopeful note with the phrase s'iz shoyn ofn toyer un tir. This is a play on an idiom. In Yiddish ba im iz ofn tir un toyer [door and gate are open to him] is a way of saying “he's doing well in life, he's made it.”

H. Leivick (the pen name of Leivick Halpern) was born in 1888 in Chervyen, in the Russian Empire. In 1905 he joined the revolutionary Jewish Bund. The next year, he was arrested by Russian Imperial authorities for distributing revolutionary literature. He refused any legal assistance during his trial and instead delivered a thunderous speech denouncing the tsarism and autocracy. He was sentenced to four years of hard labor followed by permanent exile in Siberia, to which he was forcibly marched, on foot, in 1912, over the course of four months. He was finally smuggled out of Siberia with the aid of Jewish revolutionaries in the United States, and sailed to the Americas in the summer of 1913. He returned in 1925 to what was by then the Soviet Union, where he was welcomed for his previous denunciations of tsarism, and his works were printed widely. The feeling was not at all mutual. He returned to the United States, quite un-enthusiastic about the Soviet Union, about Soviet life, and about the future of Soviet Jews.

A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, finance translator, and language teacher. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic language from the University of Maryland. His translations from the Arabic, Russian, Old English, Welsh and Classical Chinese have appeared in anthologies, journals, and one BBC radio broadcast. His hobbies include Germanic philology, writing doggerel in Old English, reading about the historical phonology of Arabic, and following rabbit holes on Facebook. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen.