Untitled
Amira Hess
Translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak
She [the soul] went to cry where the babies were and no one answered;
the night was black, a light glimmered from beyond the seven heavens:
Mother don’t burn me,
Father don’t crush my spirit
I am bodiless, trembling in the wind
I would have loved to dive like that
into the infinity of the unconscious,
to dive into this yearning for love
into the depths of places that have no end—
my unbound soul reincarnates in this body
and my complex karma’s deep as the depths of a bottomless ocean.
In the dive earth suddenly stretches
beneath her [the soul’s] body so it can stand in a place where the landscape was erased
and say
babies who need to be born will have beautiful lives,
not improvised,
and everything will be new to them
and no one will come as a reincarnation.
That’s how I was revealed in night dreams
and I see the fishes behind the glass.
Click HERE to read the Hebrew version of this work in Granta Hebrew
Amira Hess was born in Baghdad, Iraq. She made Aliya in 1951. She has written 11 poetry books. She has been awarded several literature prizes, and is a two-time recipient of the Prime Minster Prize.
Marcela Sulak is the managing editor and a poetry and creative nonfiction editor of The Ilanot Review.