Aharon Shabtai
This country is turning into the private estate of twenty families.
Look at its fattened political arm, at the thick neck of its bloated bureaucracy.
these are the officers of Samaria.
There’s no need to consult the oracle:
What the capitalist swine leaves behind, the nationalist hyena shreds with its teeth.
When the Governor of the Bank of Israel raises the interest rate by half-a-percent
the rich are provided with backyard pools by the poor.
The soldier at the outpost guards the usurer, who’ll put a lien on his home
when he’s laid off from the privatized factory and falls behind on his mortgage payments.
The pure words I suckled from my mother’s breasts: Man, Child, Justice, Mercy, and so on,
are dispossessed before our eyes, imprisoned in ghettos, murdered at checkpoints.
And yet, there’s still a good reason to stay on and live here—
to hide the surviving words in the kitchen, in the basement, or the bathroom.
The prophet Melampus[1] saved twin orphaned snakes from the hand of his slaves:
they slithered toward his bed while he slept, then licked the auricles of his ears,
When he woke with a fright, he found he could follow the speech of birds—
so Hebrew delivered will lick the walls of our hearts.
—translated by Peter Cole
[1] “Melampus' reputation as a seer spawned myths that verge on anecdote, to account for his gift, the offering of serpents. In one, as a young boy, he told his servants not to kill two snakes. Grateful, the snakes gave Melampus the ability to speak with animals. Another version says that he found a mother snake that had been crushed under a cart and two orphaned babies. Rather than leaving them he gave the snake a burial and raised the young ones. To thank him they licked his ears so that he was able to understand animals” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melampus).
[Thanks Jim]
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Adina Hoffman on this poem and on living in Jerusalem: http://www.jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/artic….
She and her husband Peter Cole run the wonderful small press Ibis Editions, with an amazing multicultural Levantine catalogue: http://www.ibiseditions.com