Betrayed

To Dror

("Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality". Romain Rolland to Stefan Zweig)

We sold our childhood
For the sweetest smell of glue
And a punch in the face
That could last longer
For an stage
That would resemble
A wall of quotations

Except your questions
That you wish I had asked
Before it all went underground
Before you stole away my mornings
And traded them for a skin
That would be easier to wear
A skin for loan

At times when I see you
It reminds me of an oak
With that humid sweat of hate
That I had framed in a wall
In a street whereby death visited me
More than oftentimes
Sometimes as a man of the cloth

But the oak one day
Was chopped down
As they wedded the poison
From the Garden of Eden
And they set Eve free
With the serpent
And deceive
I didn't mourn
Not followed the traces
In Templar cemeteries
When I lived in Mt. Zion

My oak used to wail sometimes
Whenever we laughed
It was the laughter of the pagan
That the prophet scorned
While he traded my skin
For a screen
Just like you did
Just like you do

You lived in that world
That Anje bequeathed me
While passing Breslau
In a thirsty silence
Wherever did prayer go?
In a world like that
There was no place for God
You live in that word
You barely know

Always a stranger at my door
Not unline my oak
Wailing from your beauty
Wailing for a Song of Ascents
David's murmur
That in a smile vanished
Into that small bottle
That made us adults
Only in the contempt
Only in the inability to repair
To mend

And the gateways to heaven
Remained also open
"It denotes an accessible or inaccessible throughway"
Thus read her lines
That fell upon your skin
Like thwarting iron
Melting with that inner desire
To create
To start anew
Which astrayed
With too much hope

And not just the mornings
But the twilights even
I lost
In Abendland
With the mornings thereafter
On those eyes of acute read
That survived the flesh
Embracing foreign bodies
Vivaciously foreseeing the day
When you'll tire
From this travail
And create a world
Of your own making

A world that will save you
Like Lessing's
And right there
Slightly puzzles
A bit in love, a bit in dread
You contemplated my sights
Through the smoke
Trying to knock on my door
Only to discover
That in language even
You were born in exile
Unlike Anje
Who once upon a time
Spoke in words

How your eyes
Do not cease to beseech me
In that cold blue
That falls out of your skin
As though your warmth
Were to repel them
And we exchange silent sights
That contain enough covetousness
For the generations of Noah

And there you remain
Driving northwards
Changing your fate
With every turn and every light
A man your age
Overtly childish
For wailing sights

Another betrayed world
You would say at ease
And merely going adrift
In mani-fold waters
That bemoan your nakedness
That beseech your childhood
That same old furniture
You left in my room
Inside an ashtrey
That seemly smelled to your skin
With its burning voices
That demand words
Those same words you didn't know
You lacked
Your writing on the wall
That your skin sores from
That world was lost with Anje
On the way to Theresienstadt

It's a sorry condition
That not even a God
We can assassinate
Is available these days
You only speak the language
Of reality
But it hurts you too much
And a screen
Will not turn in back those words
That separated us from the cattle
That separated
The earth from the world
Because once we've lost the philosophers
So went on strike the poets
Writing silent protests
And no one dared speak anymore
You stole my nights
And my twilights
And didn't replace them with words
You still asked me the same refined questions
Of the outsider
That can't penetrate the thinker's thick blood
You're still living in Anje's world
In a train-like mode

"The Sky is the Limit
And the Limit is just the first step"
Reads a Hebrew poem
But in a foreign language