Nava EtShalom

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

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

– Leningrad, 1 April 1957

from “Requiem”
by Anna Akhmatova
trans. Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward
in Poems of Akhmatova

a splinter of fig on your lip,

there stood
Jerusalem around us,

there stood
the bright pine scent
above the Danish skiff we thanked,

I stood
in you.

by Paul Celan
trans. John Felstiner, in his
Collected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan