A Poem by Claudio Bertoni (From movie Gloria, about a half hour in, Chilean original)




I’d like to be a nest if you were a little bird.

I’d like to be a scarf if you were a neck and were cold.

If you were music, I’d be an ear.

If you were water, I’d be a glass.

If you were light, I’d be an eye.

If you were a foot, I’d be a sock.

If you were the sea, I’d be a beach.

And if you were still the sea, I’d be a fish, and I’d swim in you.

And if you were the sea, I’d be salt.

And if I were salt, you’d be lettuce, an avocado or at least a fried egg.

And if you were a fried egg, I’d be a piece of bread.

And if I were a piece of bread, you’d be butter or jam.

If you were jam, I’d be the peach in the jam.

If I were a peach, you’d be a tree.

And if you were a tree, I’d be your sap…

And I’d course through your arms like blood.

And if I were blood, I’d live in your heart.

Sabbath Lie

BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

TRANSLATED BY GLENDA ABRAMSON

On Friday, at twilight of a summer day

While the smells of food and prayer rose from every house

And the sound of the Sabbath angels’ wings was in the air,

While still a child I started to lie to my father:

“I went to another synagogue.”

I don’t know if he believed me or not

But the taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

And in all the houses that night

Hymns rose up along with lies

To celebrate the Sabbath.

And in all the houses that night

Sabbath angels died like flies in a lamp,

And lovers put mouth to mouth,

Blew each other up until they floated upward,

Or burst.

And since then the lie has been good and sweet on my tongue

And since then I always go to another synagogue.

And my father returned the lie when he died:

“I’ve gone to another life.”

Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57322/for-the-fallen

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse   to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox   when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,   I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?   And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,   and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,   and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,   and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.   When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.   When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.   I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.   I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
Mary Oliver When Death Comes

She moved on from this world today.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver, in “When Death Comes”

FLYING WITH CHAGALL

BY NORA NADJARIAN
In loving memory of a lost friend
After Marc Chagall’s Above the Town (1915)


Silently, cloudlessly, we fly
swimming, legs and arms over
roofs and fields and streetlamps.
We skate over and above a sky
of white, our breath trailing behind us,
around the leaves and their small voices,
like notes of a fiddle.

Oh how – how do you do
it, without falling or slipping
or landing on a green roof
and bruising it blue? No one asks,
but everyone wonders. They all
look into the sky canvas and squint,
and inwardly sigh all day, all night.

It is a dream which only you and I see.
And nobody else.
And nobody else.