Nava EtShalom

So sad to learn of the passing of Taha Muhammad Ali. May his memory be for a blessing. If you haven’t yet, read his poetry and stories & this biography by Adina Hoffman. Or read, here, a poem he wrote imagining his final hours.

THERE WAS NO FAREWELL

We did not weep
when we were leaving–
for we had neither
time nor tears,
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting,
so where would our weeping
have come from?
We did not stay
awake all night
(and did not doze)
the night of our leaving.
That night we had
neither night nor light,
and no moon rose.
That night we lost our star,
our lamp misled us;
we didn’t receive our share
of sleeplessness–
so where
would wakefulness have come from?

by Taha Muhammad Ali
Trans. Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin
in So What (Copper Canyon, 2008),
where it’s printed with the original Arabic

“This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.”

Suheir Hammad, always amazing:

“Kafka remained not only in two minds about Jewishness, but sometimes quite clearly torn apart. ‘What have I in common with Jews?’ he wrote in a diary entry in 1914. ‘I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’”

That’s Judith Butler on Kafka’s “poetics of non-arrival” in the London Review of Books, March 3. Read it all.

…this is still my favorite thing on the internet.

The widow refuses sleep, for sleep pretends
that it can bring him back.
In this way,
the will is set against the appetite.
Even the empty hand moves to the mouth.
Apart from you,
I turn a corner in the city and find,
for a moment, the old climate,
the little blue flower everywhere.

by Ellen Bryant Voigt