Tikkun Magazine,  November/December 2008

POEM 

A Public Warrant

By David Avidan

[To all the interested parties]

 
  What in any case
  justifies this loneliness—
  more than anything
  how disappointing
  it all is, the holding on,
  still, when everything's gone,
  the holding on throughout the haze,
  and that old despairing daze—
  what justifies it:
  it's the simple, biting fact:
  we have nowhere to go;
  and we can't go back.

 
  In clear nights, the air,
  it freezes; the scenery is spare.
  And sometimes it rains,
  and sometimes it's hot.
  And beautiful bodies and faces
  sometimes smile, sometimes not—
  sometimes he, sometimes she complains.

 
  The landscape is simple
  and totally clear,
  angels don't climb down the ladder,
  and they don't climb up from here.
  And sometimes we hate,
  and sometimes we love:
  such a thing as we,
  few friends thereof
  and usually enemies;
  but there's passion in all of these—
  the flowing on, as you were,
  like a river, singular
  in some odd light someday;
  and if young and always dreaming
  why not stay that way—
  dreaming in a rhythm,
  onward in the light of day,
  dreaming just as you were,
  just like a river dreams, singular,
  to flow, to flow ...
  Only our aging flesh will know.

 
  And what, in any case,
  justifies this loneliness—
  more than anything
  how disappointing it all is—
  though you already know,
  and clearly, that it must be so—
  then there's the blinding
  stiffness of that knowledge:
  that finally what justifies,
  or seems to, all the despair,
  it's the simple fact in there,
  that penetrating, biting fact:
  we have nowhere to go;
  and we can't go back.

 
  Our bodies age from day to day,
  and we, like a river in daylight, flowing away—
  this glowing, brightly flaring stream—
  what justifies the terrifying dream,
  what justifies the great despair,
  and all that this knowledge may bring,
  what justifies it more than anything...

 
[P.S.]

The nights are clear
  and freezing, with a freezing air,
  there's power, there's energy there,
  but there's no love,
  and already no smile,
  and already no words; and above,
  where our hopes like to gather,
  angels aren't ascending or descending the ladder.
  Poems, as they are, can never show
  what words cannot presume to, and so
  they toss themselves off and away,
  into the big, big sea, where the waves have gone,
  up and down, up and down.

-David Avidan

translated from the Hebrew by Ishai Barnoy

Source Citation

Avidan, David. 2008. A Public Warrant. Tikkun 23(6): 79.