Sabbath

by Pia Tafdrup

The first Saturday is weightless and reflected monotonous
in the insects’ meditating buzz; the beginning endless
The second Saturday the city looks like a deserted ballroom
where the invited guests have gone home early
The third Saturday I am called out
to morning-drowsy plane trees along the sidewalk
and streets where cars stand parked in long rows
The dust sticks dry to shoes whose worn heels click
against the asphalt like homeless echoes
One or two dogs wander lazily about
and under the deep-sea sky washing is taken in
from balcony railings and the city’s flat roofs
Even the cash machines observe the Sabbath
like a prophecy that has been fulfilled
Still, a tribute to the Russian Church with its verdigris onion domes
and stray cats jumping around one another on the steps
Opposite, a barrier goes up for a jeep on the way out
otherwise the police station lies ecstatically empty
From pines the birds are heard, not seldom confused
with the sound of an old man who is playing a saw
and among clusters of roses the oleander blooms like wild fever
at the traffic lights near the Jaffa Gate
where groups of bird-like men with taliths
appear on foot en route to the synagogue
Mornings where Jerusalem seems no less quiet
than when Jonah slept safely on the bottom of the storm-tossed ship
as I remember it from my childhood’s sailing.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Two Poems

from Territorial Song [Territorialsang, 1994]
by Pia Tafdrup

A CITY IN HEAVEN

My blood has many relatives.
They never visit.

Yehuda Amichai

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
Born in Warsaw, born in Budapest, born in Kiev
Born in Moscow, born in Berlin, born in Craiova
in Sofia, in Prague – they come to the city of David

A language they leave, letters from home
go up this generation or the next in smoke and oblivion
or vanish in the glowing ether’s sphere
In the light from wax candles they drown themselves out
and the family is only visited in dreams

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
heavenly bodies glide in their paths
They live under evening-warm clouds now with desert mist and wine
cut bread in slices, eat figs and pomegranates
know the rocket shelter as well they do the prayers
they recite, and the songs of blood, milk and honey

They have cuddled one another wearing gas masks
children they lose in the war-
that-never-stops
They celebrate holy days and will be buried here
to awaken the earth with their longing

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
heavenly bodies glide in their paths
words intertwine and let go in winged song
Born in Warsaw, born in Budapest, born in Kiev
Born in Moscow, born in Berlin, born in Craiova
in Sofia, in Prague…



HORIZON

Like grains of salt held forth
Jerusalem sprouts
up from the mountain

Red and pink limestone
a desert all round
that obeys and flowers

Time
is momentary
and millennial

Wind harp
shifting sand
evening sun

Voices
graze the ear
that scans the pain:

In the darkness under a hatch for fishing tackle
my father and his family in a cutter
across the Sound to Sweden

On the bottom of another boat my grandfather
and on a shelf in the engine room
my mother and her mother…

Count the many
see the one
nothing must be limited, no one be forgotten

Each consciousness its tell*
a memory
that keeps the dread awake

The day is great
as a stone of burden
I lean towards the silent paper

Spin a life-thread.



*tell - from Hebrew tel, a heap of ruins, a mound that forms an archaeological site.


0translated from Danish by David McDuff