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Poetry || SubmissionsThree Poems by Asher ReichTHE UNIVERSE HAS VANISHED The universe has vanished. Only the sun still remains. In silence it wakes the emptiness. Thus Mr. Zilberman dreamt 1944. An undestroyed past pieced with patches of forty two years, after a life-day in the Shoah film. That night the dream returned - Water came back to life in a cloud and fire in ash again revived Unfinished death wrapped him like a wounded coat. He woke midnightmare. And with confident clarity, slowly put on his Treblinka clothes, shaved with care, made his bed, opened the gas, and peaceful and sure went back to bed. LISTEN TO ME DEAF LOVE Listen to me Deaf Love and I will tell you what I feel from beyond your scintillating silence and what I knew to feel without you in the roots of the heart that have already whitened like my mother's hair. Listen to me Stubborn Obsession and I will tell you who I am, waking with you nightly and what I would be without you in the silent darkness of the light. Love with light feet, you are a life prisoner to me. Where are you exactly when you sleep by my side? What was near to the eye like a remote desire that has lost its way blossomed in your absence. Go thee on your distant way, my desire, and become a singing sea shell that my love may hear through you the throbbing of my heart. THE FLIGHT GOES ON Childhood was the art of aviation in air. Words from the prayerbook glided in space, I saw mingled voices of prayer rise up like a victim. And when I lifted my head to the skies I heard my eyes: here comes a kite from another planet. The shtibelach were homosexual doves' nests, and I as an infant captured in an air pocket grew with a sensibility rotten as a tooth. At night, in dreams of instinct, I flew to the four corners of far away neighborhoods, crossing gates to another century, passing within transient worlds of eros. Among the blind of the Lord I was as a visionary under the agnostic firmament and the wind damaged all the idols in me. Above the clouds the flight still continues. The room's spaces were spaceships floating in imagination's light, a chance sailing to the faraway past, now running before me with fifty memories. For a moment I stop and count: two hundred and forty eight organs make a body. Six hundred and thirteen commands accompanied me there like wild shadows. And how many organs made a soul like the photo album of a God-persecuted child? Asher Reich is one of Israel's leading poets and translators of poetry. These poems were translated from the Hebrew by Karen Alkalay-Gut Today's Situation
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