Friday afternoon radio in Israel is nostalgia time, when old favorite presenters play old favorite oldies to ease out of the week. One Friday afternoon an older lyricist than usual came up during the afternoon program as it played in the kibbutz dairy.

When my wife was working in the dairy

On kibbutz In northern Israel

A Friday afternoon song

Came over the radio

“Take Me in Under Your Wing”

That I read aloud the first time I met her.

The dairyman said to the Israeli girls

Milking beside her, “You know who wrote that?”

They shrugged. He turned to her

More or less out of politeness.

She looked at him, “Bialik?”

He looked back in amazement.

“You see,” He waved his hand

Over the fields, tracks of cud chewer excrement,

“You see, this girl in the land just six weeks

Knows who Bialik is!”

They milked cows and took tithes

And changed pumps for the Sabbath milking

But nobody knew who she was

As she walked up the snake path to the cabin

To wash away the filth

And pray before sunset

And find the law behind a stone

In Jerusalem, not the place she left.

Image via Wikimedia

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The silencing of women’s voices and appropriation of their bodies is not new. These poems look for dignity in the silences of Dinah and Batsheva and ask readers to imagine the part of their experiences which has been lost to us.

Dinah

Who tailored

this alteration of a dream,

to seize Dinah,

Before her father heard and her brothers echoed,

Who took her without words before,

only after?

Jacob’s sons reasoned

In the nerveless refuge of revenge.

    How shall we deal with our sister?

We have seams of earth,

flocks, water, and swords.

She holds nothing but a man’s eye.

Silent, when he found her,

cloaked her,

stopped her.

She had words before,

delivered to other daughters,

when she could still speak.

Dinah’s brothers hauled their pain

and silenced the city.

Jacob wrestled and learned who he was,

but Dinah was gone.

Batsheva

She could feel the sun

and the dust lifting

from the stones on the roof

spelling words of war.

From her window

she watched the Law

carried like an ageing father

too tired to remember his sons.

Batsheva’s eyes were half closed.

She saw promises of cornered fields,

angled houses,

nights saved by water.

On this day she was alone.

There was no one in the city,

as she drew inside the picture

of a woman bathing,

turning her waist in the king’s tent.

Image of painting “Bathsheba at Bath” by Paolo Veronese via Wikimedia

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After my father died we had to clear the apartment he kept his office in, and my mother started collecting old menorahs from thrift stores. I still can’t go past a window display with some old Jew’s cast-offs without wondering when that was last lit, and how.

I saw the first on top

of a book case, hiding, funereal

and black as a cenotaph

tucked behind my father’s photo.

The next was on the ledge

of the window and she showed it

– opening the tiny frame

in the heart that contained ten commandments.

The last one (recently acquired)

was stone in part, and green amethyst

(or look-alikes) bejewelled the cups

where the candles, if it were used, would be put.

Why she should collect the lamps

of the dead, who don’t light their candles,

take them home instead and light

just her own one  I could not say.

But she stands running her hands

on the candle cups. Her doctor mentioned:

“You can’t just leave them. It’s a call.”

And my mother agreed, bought a new set

and when she lights it is the first

of at least ten that gleams

in the gloom of the back room.

It’s a cold room.

I notice my father’s room;

their bedroom, where he died, a sad room.

It has light now and flowers

but still you can’t help hearing him, groaning.

She says, “There really aren’t

that many lamps in junk shops,”

as more and more Jews die

and their sons clear their house for scrap.

She says, “Only this one, and that.

You can’t leave them. In shops

You have to rescue them.” She hangs

a hand on the brass candle cup.

We take candles wherever we go

something requires that we light

before full dark – it isn’t law,

it is the need for someone else to see the match.

If you find a lamp – please do not leave it –

somehow you’ll find your way back

to when you were at home, and light was with someone

and a spark fell before dark.

Atar Hadari’s “Songs from Bialik” was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award. His Pen Translates award winning “Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin” is out from Arc Publications in January 2018.

Image via Wikimedia

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