Like the dead in the hands of the Lord, in your hearts you’ve forgotten

your dead in their graves, your slain ones cut down

In Ukraine by the swords of the Christians, in downtrodden Zion by the

swords of Islam.

Your slain with their innards ripped out, and their backs hacked apart,

who were stabbed in the eyes and the heart and the ribs,

Your slain with their charred, severed heads and their legs roasted like

goats on a flame

A bonfire the enemy made of your home.

Your slain whom the bloodthirsty son of Hagar has slaughtered and

trampled, like olives or grapes in a press,

And are brought to their burial like meat to the market — —

More bitter than death was this death: to be suddenly battered and riven

and crushed…

The limbs and the pieces of flesh that the Jews have collected to lay to

rest

From here and from there in the slick of congealed blood and brains,

Not knowing to which of the sheet-covered dead they belong,

For the dead have no mouths to say: “No, that part’s mine! That one’s

his!”

O my Jews, to what shall I liken your oblivious stupor?

— You are like an animal that does not remember its young once gone

from its sight!

As deaf as Jerusalem stone are the ears of your soul to the wolfish

lament of the usual mourners,

Who, like suits stuffed with pieces of cloud, stand and pour out a warm,

salty rain over their dismembered dead;

As these Babylonians, Yemenites, puffed up with sighing

Pull at their hair and scratch at their cheeks — —

So these wolfish laments are sounded again and again wept at each

world-heavy step

Thrown into the furnace like molten zinc:

With the essence of sorrow and gnawing despair and grief like a fire

and a sulfurous stench — —

Ah, like the mound on which blood and brain were spilled and dried in

the cracks and crevices until none of their moisture remained,

So you’ve forgotten the blood that was spilled by the Philistine sword

on the floor of your house.

You’ve polished the shoes you wore when you passed through that

shallow red sea…

Laundered each bloodstain that clung to your clothes.

Scrubbed the floors, whitewashed the walls where the awful blood-

writing leapt from each gash,

And opened the windows to the air of the world: to tell darkness leave,

to beckon light in.

Like a once-bloody garment your conscience is laundered: not like the

rags of the beggar, oh no,

The murderer washes his garment once, and again, wrings it out, and

then hangs it to dry — —

Oh no, as the killer returns to his usual job, his eating and rutting,

hidden from the eyes of the Lord and the law,

You too, you kin of the murdered, are quiet and clever: with the peace

and the wisdom of fools!

Your fate was not honed on the battlefield, nor grasped in your hands

like the double-edged sword

In the hands of the soldiers of King David’s house!

— Your sufferings have not the logic of steel like the skewers with

which the sicarii took revenge

But only the softness of souls gone to rot!

From the days of distress you have yet to assemble a ladder to mount to

the heights and howl at the world,

Nor even drilled down to the stays of the earth with your stifled rage!

You’re stuck here like reeds in the swamp of your lives: if the storm

comes you bend, and if not then you stand.

Your tongues are like clappers of commonplace bells, not those of a

house of prayer.

A laugh in your mouths, or chatter, or the worries of fools, not curses

and wrath.

Not the beating of prophecy like the sun beating down on the skin of

your back.

Not an expression burned into your face like a brand before all you

meet.

Your poets of falsehood pluck on their harpstrings a gilded lie,

And sing of the good little lamb that dwells in your flesh…

As if both sides of the Jordan were yours, a temple to Israel’s God on

the purified mount

And the fleet on the sea — all yours!

As if the bread that you eat were not sliced from the flesh of the dead.

And the water you drink after boiling, and the wine that you sip, were

not bloody

For your drink is brewed from the tears of the dead and the fluid that

seeps from their dagger-pierced kidneys — —

At night on the stage of the theater the clown works his charms —

and you sit there and laugh!

And the graveyard where your dead are interred is a succulent feast for

the maggots of Canaan! — —

You are carefree, and clever, and laughing.

And carefree like you are the killers. Carefree the sword in its sheath

and carefree the dagger:

Like the thought of a day of distress yet to come — — and meanwhile

the evenings are lovely in Canaan…

At nighttime they dance in the villages, these artists of slaughter,

beneath the beautiful skies of the Lord of the Hebrews,

A feast they arrange and a bonfire they build and a Jewish lamb roast in

the fire, a lamb that they stole from its fold,

And they gorge on the lamb as if on the flesh of a Jew they had cut with

the sword.

A bonfire they build (for the law of Muhammad is fire) and by its light

they are honored to tell

With much laughter and snorting the tale of the slicing and hacking and

gutting of corpses;

The pleasures of arson, each house, each cowshed and barn.

The impure Arab mouth speaks and the hands give additional shape to

the tale:

The wondrous inventions of murderers not yet inscribed on a page

Of the memorial book of this sorry community of our exile: this

Hebrew shtetl in downtrodden Zion — —

A tale of the kind you find here and there, which a handful of dolorous

souls in the camp of each generation

Drank in with their lamb-eyes from the books of our torment:

The tear-soaked dirges and threnodies read in the annals of medieval

Germany, Portugal, Spain,

Or found in accounts of the Chmielnicki massacres,

And in the Yiddish laments from the days of Czar Nicholas till now

From Poland and Ukraine, unsigned and unsealed — —

You are carefree, and clever, and laughing.

And each morning the sun like a golden calf emerges to play in Arabian

skies…

Your women walk mincingly: their hair cut like boys and their bodies

exposed.

(Among them the victims of rape and of rapes yet to come!)

Daughter like mother in sleeping and rising, son like father in habit and

deed.

Without echo of prayer-tunes or the pulse of desire in the blood.

Without laws of religion or kingdom’s decorum, or even the faint

aspiration to sovereignty.

As the great man with his wife, so the younger man laughs with his

girl.

As the speech of the elders, so the words of the youth.

A generation of pompadours and hats tilted back on their heads — —

The beads of their grief like droplets of mercury fled, as the images

died in their eyes,

Like the gates of the Temple destroyed.

You willingly humbled yourselves, the descendants of David reduced to

a mere congregation of midgets,

By a psychic derangement compelled:

And not before Rome, nor an heir to its crown and its glory,

But a Philistine tribe to which we are slaves not masters!

They have not grown in their stature, it is you who have shrunk!

The thirty-six parts of divinity rave in the streets as though they’ve

been slaughtered and no one responds to their pain!

No one will read the great composition of letters divine!

There is no secret place for the soul in this desolate corpse of a house.

In this house there is no one who prays, no heart song, no sunrise.

In this house is a cistern for rain and a sewer for blood.

In this house is a stomach for Nazirite food and a brain that cooks plots

for its meager existence.

The heart has been stuck in this house like a clock on a shelf — —

This house does not stand before God in the depths of time’s suffering

awaiting the messiah who knocks at the gate — —

Amen, for cursed am I, cursed to witness all this with my eyes, to

record it with my pen

What the wise man will mock, and dismiss with a shake of his head and

a wave of his hand.

Whether I am, as I write this, like one who is shipwrecked and scrawls

his report yet again

To be stuffed in a bottle and cast on the waves

So that maybe this message of grief will yet find its way to some

person and utter its tale on the shore — —

Or whether I’ll drown in the small sea of my own blood.

April 1930 / Jerusalem the Holy