two-poem thursday!

Hey guys, if you are reading/following this blog and have a Google account, could you put yourselves down as following the blog? This doesn't mean you have to check it every day or anything, it would just be nice for me to know who, if anyone, is reading what I put up here...

Anyway, sometimes when I get a "stuffy nose," writerly speaking - when I'm not happy with what I'm writing and think it sounds a little off, and everything I write seems to be slightly awry, I try writing in Hebrew... I'm 'bilingual,' which means that I've been learning Hebrew since I was six years old (and my mom spoke it at home a little, although we always made fun of her for it) and I spent a year in Israel with Israelis and I've been relentlessly exposed to it... which is to say I have an imperfect, not very refined vocabulary... one of the good things about writing in a second but comfortable language is that I expect a certain degree of stiltedness and so I paradoxically am much freer to express the concepts I want to. All of which is a very long prelude to saying: I wrote a (clusmy) poem in Hebrew today. Following it is a clumsy translation.


לא נעים לי עוד לשוט בחיי
כספינה קטנה מוטלת ברוחות
לבד במים ומשתוקקת לנגיעות החול.
קשה עלי לסבול חיים בלי פלא.
לאהבה ולשמחה אני כאיש יושב בפתח בית
ובתוך הבית הילולה נדירה וגדולה
עם יין ומדורות...
נמעס לי עוד להרטיב את שרווליי בבכי
ולחלום על עבר מזהיר שלא היה.

עוצמת העולם עבר ממלך לאצילים,
נפוץ והתפזר ויושב עכשיו איתנו...
גם בי קיים כח ההחלטה,
חלש וכמעת נרדם,
לא בטוח, כמו נשמה, בהיותו בי בכלל...
אהה, השעות יורדות בבטן השעון החול! --
בוא אלי, אהוב, ופה נוכיח
שלא נעלמו כל חום וזעם משטח העולם.


I'm no longer content to sail in my life
like a small ship cast about by winds,
alone in the water, dying for the touch of the sand.
It weighs on me to live a life without wonder.
To love and joy I am like a man who sits on the threshold
and in the house is a rare party filled
with wine and bonfires...
I want no longer to wet my sleeves with weeping
and to dream of a shining and fictious past.

Power in the world passed down from kings to lords,
spread and diffused, and sits now in us all.
I also hold the power of decision,
weak, near to sleep,
unsure, like a soul, of its own existence there...
O, the hours descend in the belly of the clock!
Come to me, love, and we will prove
that all heat and wrath have not dispelled
from the surface of the world.



ALSO
this is the poem I was writing and then got discouraged and then wrote a poem in Hebrew and then finished:



Two women passed me in the square
carrying black bowls in their hands.
Outside the all-night market the beggar shakes her cup.
And another woman roared a love song at a stopped car's wheel
and took off howling her rotten joyful rage
like a shout down the great asphalt tongue
of the boulevard into the night.

The numbers gentle on through the belly of the clock.
If I walk long enough,
if the air grows cold enough on my body,
will I shed my husk at last,
will I grow admirable and good?

My soul is busking its desires
on a worn guitar to an indifferent promenade..