A Beetle’s Life
Rent from DeepDyve- A Beetle’s Life
A black beetle slowly makes her wayand you say: How ugly.Body hunched, eyes undeterred,she got here from Pakistan.Give that black beetle some attention,attention must be paid,she came here to work and to dreamof a future brightand briefwhich, as beetles go, is the very heightof happiness.Do her no harm,she asks only your pityand goes on crawling.In her foolish heart of heartsevery beetle’s awareyou will not take pity on her,will not do her bidding. [End Page 20]
Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005), one of the great Hebrew poets of our time, was widely honored for her artistry and admired for her courage as a peace activist. Her poems have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (Norton) presents in English for the first time the full trajectory of her life in poetry.
Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems will be published in 2015. She is the author of four books of poems—The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey—as well as cotranslator of the Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai’s Selected Poetry and his Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Bloch is professor emerita at Mills College, where she directed the creative writing program.
Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems will be published in 2015. She is the author of four books of poems—The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey—as well as cotranslator of the Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai’s Selected Poetry and his Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Bloch is professor emerita at Mills College, where she directed the creative writing program.
