Photo by Tigerulze on 500px
It’s Late, Europe
Violins bloom in the sky,
a straw hat, excuse me, what year is it?
Thirty nine and a half almost, it’s early, early.
Turn off the radio.
Let me introduce: the sea breeze, the lively boardwalk-wind, its magical and mischievous
mind twirling in a bell-shaped dress, clinging
on the face of worried newspapers: tango! tango!
And the city park harmonizes.
I kiss your hand, Madame,
your soft hand like
a white leather glove.
Everything will return to its right order,
dream,
do not worry so much, Madame,
here, it will never happen,
you will see,
never here.
A Lesson in Observation
Pay attention, the world that is now on zero-point-zero-one degree
was,
as far as it is known, the only one not silent.
Floating in a blue bubble, quite large:
sometimes there were clouds, ocean breezes,
sometimes a home, maybe a kite, and children,
here and there an angel,
or a large garden, or a city.
Underneath all were the dead, underneath them
rock, underneath it a jail of fire.
Clear? I will say it again: outside were
clouds, screams, air-to-air missiles,
fire in the fields, memory.
Underneath those, deep, were houses, children. What else? The dot at the side?
That seems to be
the only moon of that world,
which turned away long before anything began.
Poetry by Dan Pagis, an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor. He was born in Rădăuţi, Bukovina in Romania and imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He died in 1986
