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Who will stay behind, and what? A wind.
Blindness from the blind man disappearing.
A token of the sea: a strand of foam.
A cloud stuck in a tree.
Who will stay behind, and what? A single sound
as genesis regrasses its creation.
Like the violin rose that honors just itself.
Seven grasses of that grass do understand.
More than all the stars hence and northward,
that star will stay that sinks into a tear.
Forever in its jug, a drop of wine remains.
What will be left here? God. Not enough for you?
Translated from the Yiddish
Source:
Poetry
(November 2014)
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This poem originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Poetry magazine
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Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in what is now Belarus. He was a Yiddish-language poet whose works chronicle his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto during World War II, and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1915 Sutzkever and his family fled their home in eastern Europe to Siberia to escape World War I; they returned to the region in 1920 and lived near Vilna, where he later studied literary criticism at the University of Vilna. Sutzkever testified at the Nuremberg trials, and in 1947 he settled in Palestine (later Israel).
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