October 29th, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • 3 Comments
Elisha Porat
—Translated from the Hebrew by Ward Kelley and the author.
PAINFUL BIRDS
The helicopters, skillful, painful birds,
Again bombard targets above my head:
I sit shaking at my writing desk,
I bend down to my notebook, clench
My shaking pen. As if they know…
As if they sense an inner tracer, a red laser
Signal: they make another bomb run,
This time circling above my aging heart,
Who hastens to remove its rooms
And empty spaces as though they had become
Black tanks, easy targets, sluggish vehicles
Flooded by grief and suffering.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
Tribute to Poets Writing Abroad
Thank you, sometimes I forget how lucky I am to live in Australia.
Elisha Porat is a humanist whose work I avidly read and profoundly admire. “Painful Birds” is another poem that will be with me for a long time.
Dear Mark William Jackson, you are really lucky. Last visit in Israel, I saw the World War I military cemeteries, and identied many graves of the “Anzac” hero soldiers, including many Australian among them.