Seeker Magazine
Elisha Porat
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Elisha Porat has graced the two previous issues of Seeker with stories, autobiographical in nature, and now Poet Portrait is pleased to honor his poetical side. Born in 1938 in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael (pre Israel) to parents who were among the founders of a Kibbutz near the city of Hadera, Porat still makes his home near his parents' original tent in the Kibbutz. He served in the Israeli army and fought in the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the War of south Lebanon in 1982.
His work in the Kibbutz fruit orchard and his military service have both profoundly influenced his writing. He's had 17 volumes of fiction and poetry published in Hebrew and was the 1996 winner of Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature. A collection of his short stories entitled The Messiah of LaGuardia was published in English in 1997, and he has recently published The Dinosaurs of the Language, a book of Hebrew poetry. In 1998, Porat journeyed out onto the internet, and his poetry and stories can now be found in many literary Ezines.
MEMORY OF MY YOUTH
for Sima and Ephy Eyal
Poetry is a sudden process
of verbal compression.
I remember well one such illumination:
her father was a famous artist
who used to load his brush
with one bullet many --
to explode on the canvas with first touch.
He drew the beautiful head of his daughter
and shook his head with pity at my sweaty pages:
I feel for the two of you,
she dosen`t know yet
that a poet is a continuous process
of the pain of existence.
Translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keler.
MIGRATING BIRDS
for Shaul, my son
Above the Stella Maris lighthouse
two hundred pelicans in flight.
The air is heavy today, and their flapping sluggish
across the graying sea,
above the green mountain cliffs.
Like an arrowhead pitched north
they join head to tail
forging a blocked secure formation.
All at once their line breaks
their feathers scatter
from the threat of the spinning chopper
descending toward roofs,
urgently, despairingly, seeking
the center of the bright square:
the landing tract of "Ramba`m Hospital" on sea.
Translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keler.
This poem was read by Elisha Porat to Pope John Paul II
and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and German,
all of which are posted at motherbird.com
The lost Son
He came back, but he came like a stranger
He came back, looked about and did not
Recall, for to him, all appeared estranged:
The house, the yard, the narrow lane.
Their memory sliced through his heart,
Cut, and he who survived and was favoured
Came back; and he who had sworn back there
That nothing would he forget, estranged though it be:
A dirt path, and the barren field and the ditch
At the edge, and the Lemon tree with its bitter fruit.
He felt that his absence was almost ordained:
To come back at last, to come like a stranger
With a shadowy memory that was not estranged,
And an unravelled thread of burning desire
That will never more be made whole.
Translated by Asher Harris, June 1998.
STRANGE SNOW
Strange soft snow descends
on the slopes of Jebel-El-Kabir
chill and silent it falls
on dugouts and vehicles
armoured on the screens of memory.
Astray in me in the damp haze
forgotten comrades call
whose lives once touched my life
now grown distant beyond the roads
the roadblocks the rolling hardware.
Once, among them, I saw
such a pure white suddenly crushed;
minced and ploughed under and rearing up
and then subsiding silently absorbing
rent veins and a reddening stain.
Translated by Riva Rubin.
The Fragrance of Mignonette
"Until I smelled the fragrance
of the cut grass, I didn't believe
I was home again." said the young soldier
back stricken from the battle on the Canal.
And I, who was stricken after him, fifteen years
after him, did not believe I had risen
from my bed: drunk as then climbing
to the clay hilltop, flattening myself
on its grass. And reviving in its
good warmth: like a child coming back
wrapped in the sweet fragrance of Mignonette.
Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden, 1999.
A Cracked Statuette
In the summer of seventy-nine,
Sheltered in the shade, on a step in Market
Street, in the shop of a Christian Arab,
While my hand was stroking the halo of hair
Of a graven statuette -
A startling voice suddenly broke out,
A young announcer begging, pleading: hurry, whoever is able,
Whoever is near, run to the tower
Of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher -
Through the lattice you may know her:
Wrapped all in black but her hair is fair,
And her car still pulses below her.
And when I arrived - I was late -
With those who were called to her aid,
The helpers, the radio was screaming,
And all the city was frozen, holding its breath -
Already she lay there, stretched out in the square:
Innocent, beautiful, and wrapped all about in the shining
Radiance of a cracked statuette.
WITHOUT A EULOGY
What he wanted was
to hide among the simple
or among the small
whose greatness
he had always craved.
To be at rest with friends
cloaked in the pride of the meek without words,
and without even a eulogy.
And after that, only this:
To lie below tender shoots
sheltered in the shade of thorns
and to hear nothing
but Blackbirds singing.
Translated from the Hebrew by Alan Sacks.
(Copyright - All Rights Reserved by Elisha Porat - No reproduction without express permission from the author)
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Letter to the Author:
Elisha Porat at porat_el@einhahoresh.org.il