At Cross Purposes

By Samuel Menashe 1925–2011 Samuel Menashe

Is this writing mine

Whose name is this

Did I underline

What I was to miss?

An upheaval of leaves

Enlightens the tree

Rooted it receives

Gusts on a spree

Beauty makes me sad

Makes me grieve

I see what I must leave

Scaffold, gallows

Do whose will

Who hallows wood

To build, kill

Blind man, anvil

No hammer strikes

Your eyes are spikes

Samuel Menashe, “At Cross Purposes” from Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, published by The Library of America, 2005. Copyright © 2004 by Samuel Menashe. Used by permission of the author.

Source: Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (The Library of America, 2005)

Biography

Samuel Menashe earned acclaim as the creator of numerous compact and precise poems. His first American volume, No Jerusalem But This, was praised by Stephen Spender for "language intense and clear as diamonds." Spender declared that Menashe "can compress an attitude to life that has an immense history into three lines."

To Open, Menashe's 1974 collection, impressed Christian Science Monitor critic Victor Howes with its . . .

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