Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
POEM
Children
By Eytan Eytan
Children you who will die in the next war
Burnt up in tanks or ripped by splintered
shells, shocked
Your hands and your limbs torn from
you
Be not afraid
Be not afraid of its arrival
Because you will die in the next war
Suddenly or slowly or with no warning
or during a desperate fight
Be not afraid now and fear not its arrival
Because death will take you in war and
without war
At its own choosing
Children you are and you will die in
the next war
Following a deafening furor
Because there is no war without death
and no war without furor
And no life without death at its own
choosing
Rush not to swallow the poison awaiting
you
And rush not to love or to hate
Hold no hope for rescue or that war
will not come
Because it will
And battle awaits you
Torn flesh burnt bodies and spilled
blood and gray shriveled bones
And hovering ghosts
Children you who will die in the next
war
Will leave this valley of tears with
nothing
The righteous will continue to cheat
and to steal and to send you into
the next war to die under a bright
sun or a dark moon or the remote
stars
Beneath you will lie in the shivering
earth
Because you will die children
And cannot escape from death
You will fear no more when in your
deaths
While those who remain will weep
they will weep for themselves
And your souls will tremble in transparence
and light
Over this accursed earth where flesh
covers bone
And over this accursed earth where
man has forever chased after war
There are no grounds for fear. Children
you are
And children you will die. No brothers
to you are your enemies and your
brothers are your enemies.
Because a gun has an aim when it
speaks
It is better that the warrior die than be
butchered in retreat
I am speaking of my contempt for
death
Of my contempt for the death you will
die in the next war
I speak plainly and I speak truth
Fires will burn through the night, fires
Ships will sink in the sea, ships
Men will fall in the dark, men
Phone lines will be severed, power
Bridges will give way, roads
Transmitters will be shattered
Journalists bodies impaled, writers
Cars will burn and the thick stench of
corpses
Will burn your eyes, your throats
You from the hills of Ephraim, from
the hills of Judea
You from the coastal plain, you from
the ruins of Jerusalem.
You who hold each others' hands and
you who grasp another's heels none
will
survive you
I am speaking to you
I am speaking from the valley of death
I am speaking from the valley of death
that will rise in a mound of corpses
Poisoned the reservoirs and the air poisoned
The people will seek shelter and the
children will howl
The old, the women will cry out with
death in their mouths
No blood will be spilled
Why spill blood
Why kill in blood
A dove will awaken in smoke
Its voice in song
Its smoke-filled voice alone, its smoke-
drenched wings beating alone
A voice from the valley of death
A troupe passes in silence
Turmoil breaks loose from its cage
Rubble, ashes, bones, mountains of
plastic and rusted cans
The dead cannot scratch
Nor can the living
But why
Can someone say why
What says the speaker
Or even the righteous
A bald one and she-bears
None have survived, ascend ascend
With one stone, take my mantle
A chariot of fire of fire in the sky
To the sea runs a stream of blood
Take my mantle, let the stream stop
Let earth bring forth manure and milk
and fruit and meat
Let the earth split open and swallow
half the people
On the highway east of Jordan an orphan
of purple light stands on the
ridged hills
The winds scream through the body, relent,
then begin again
My cold body flat against the earth a
part of the earth apart from the earth
the winds battering the earth
The moon spreads its cold light over the
mountain.
Elohim's chill bitter cold, lonely. A face
standing.
How full the soul is, how full the souls
float over moonlight fills the mountain,
hovering over the mountain full
of light, the light-filled souls
I was a child standing in death
Dissolving in the mists sinking and dissolving
On the hard earth my feet stepped
through mists
I have felt nourished in a gray field of
blood nourished have I felt
I've seen a child and have been nourished
I was a child in a gray field of blood I
was
Fully alive
A shadow falls along the River Jordan
Taking sharp turns
From the mountains a shadow falls
Rising from the valley
Shivering in a dense wet fog
The shadow of a dove, a tree heavy with
sleep
A tree heavy with sleep in the mountains
The shadow is fire, a body trapped in
darkness.
Patches of light and thunder
What of the body's trembling in sickening
explosions
Bodies touch, cling in the shivering
earth
It's shivering, silently shivering, pleading,
come to me
In the end come to me come into the sea
in the light of day come in the hot
sun beneath a hot sun come to me
In my trembling come on me. Come in
my trembling
And comes the singing of angels coming
white in the morning light
Light of morning the singing of angels
White singing of angels white as death
in life
—Eytan Eytan; Translated from the Hebrew by Merrill Leffler and Moshe Dor
Source Citation
Dor, Moshe and Leffler, Merrill. 2007. Children. Tikkun 22(1): 74.
RELATED ARTICLE
Eytan Eytan was born in 1940 and grew up among the hills of the Lower Galilee. A graduate of the military high school in Haifa, he volunteered for Israel's naval commandos and saw fierce action during the six-day war in 1967, the war of attrition in the years following, and the Yom Kippur war in 1973. His experience of the murderous brutality that is war is inseparable from his life as a farmer, a man who tilled the earth and trusted in its fecundity—this dual sensibility is evident in much of Eytan's work, from beautifully subtle love poems to the intensely powerful "Children" (Yeladim in Hebrew), a poem that is fervently anti-war, desperate in its anguish, incantory, and, finally, transcendent. The transcendence may derive from Eytan's rootedness in the land and mountains: despite man's violence and cruelty, the earth continues to yield nourishment and life itself.
The tone of Eytan Eytan's poems is unique among modern Israeli poets—his Hebrew is both ancient and modern, his voice at times oracular and apocalyptic like the Hebrew prophets.
Like all poets writing in Hebrew, his work cannot help but have allusions to the Bible. Some are inescapably familiar and will resonate with many readers, for example, in Genesis, "grasp another's heels" (Jacob and Esau) and "the dead cannot scratch" (Book of Job). But there are the no-so-familiar allusions as in, "What says the speaker/Or even the righteous/a bald one and she-bears/None have survived ...." This refers to Elisha in Kings 11:24. This allusion, spare as it is even for the knowledgeable reader, evokes the speaker's rootedness in ancient traditions and thereby, even when meaning cannot be easily incorporated except by a footnote, can still evoke a sense of authority and mystery.
Eytan Eytan died in 1991 from cancer. Two of his three collections of poetry appeared in his lifetime in Israel; Selected Poems is forthcoming from Keshev Publishing. A collection of his poems in English, A Guest in Your Own Body, is currently being translated by Merrill Leffler and Moshe Dor.
—Josh Weiner
