Poetry
The Complaint of Jehudah Abravanel
IN spring the sap, by virgin birth reborn, surges from withered roots to winter-numbed limbs ; old wounds now bleed afresh, old pains revive.
The exile remembers the loved landscape and crosses the frontier, in spite of police, is caught, shot ; the spy in foreign parts throws caution to the winds, sings his native songs.
I, topmost branch of my race's tree, bleed where my son was lopped off by fate ; no further can I cleave the stormy years towards sheer light.
Fate, with its wiles, annuls my spring, cancels my infant buds, the sap rising to feed my leaves. Fate's frost withholds me in winter, blights my hopes.
He whom I hoped to win where I had failed, to climb where I had stopped panting at the foot of the last flight, to find light in my dark, strength in my weakness, remembering my errors, profiting by my successes, firm with the creditors, just with debtors, defeating all those who would rob an old father, my son, can never read these words, signs of the hidden word, these books where I set down all that I sought and found, yet seek or left for my son and my son's sons to find.
My individual entity, that mask, is so torn asunder, I can no longer suffer, nor feel, when memory's knife cuts to the quick my age-numbed mind.
On evenings when friendship no longer suffices, nor the disputations of doctors, when the air is thick with the day's dust, the mind with its talk, the last sun-ray falls across the open book and the mind finds no sense in the printed word, weary of too much study, too much seeking after cause in a world of effect.
Desire, like this last sun-ray, falls across the dim open book of memory, throim light on one word, gives a, clue to the text, offers my son as the key to my life.
For the mind is a mirror reflecting the thing, lo-Ying that which it has known, desiring that which it knows, has lost : There is no love of a thing unknown, unremembered.
Nor can I, loving, forget my loved son.
who now no longer can be made twain from his loving father. Each spring the dry crumbs of that which last year had leavened my thoughts are swept out of my mind. New bread is baked. But, the memory, intent on the new, swerves back to the old, can never forget : I see my son walking towards me in each street.
EDOUARD RODITI.
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