לכה
- לכה
[End Page 102]
[End Page 104]
- All
Life that swirls in the scraps of swallows in the early evening,reaching out red from within the flower,sprawling lazily along the entire length of the cat,barking and then listening for a moment to itself within the dog,fluttering in the gecko's transparent belly,hiding behind the appearance of separate formsmoving inside the wheat or frozen in a trampled badger's bodyon one side of the roadall, all of this –life that formulates and deconstructs in philosophers' mindsthat twists in the bodies of spring vipersor is whispered by a cold carp,whose secret glistens in the geometry of spider webs, [End Page 103] gushes green endlessly from the earthor wanders restless in the bodies of storksall—rustling in thickets,strangling lovely homes in the clutches of ivy,steaming toward the window from the pots of barley soup,dispersed in the semen scent of flowering carobrising in bellies and in poems the length of a cigarette,
life that exhales now between the ribsin the heart's harmonicaall of this—we are. [End Page 105]
Agi Mishol is one of Israel's most popular contemporary poets. Her latest volume of poems, House Call, following on a dozen earlier ones, was published in Israel in summer of 2009; the title poem deals at length with her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her next book will be a selection of essays on writing and literature, including the figure of the muse. Look There, a selection of her poems in English, was published by Graywolf Press in 2006. She has two children and two new grandchildren.
Lisa Katz won the 2008 Mississippi Poetry Prize. Reconstruction, a volume of her poetry translated from English into Hebrew, as well as poems written in Hebrew, was published by the veteran Israeli press Am Oved in 2008. A secular American, in 1983 she moved from her native New York to Israel, where she now works as a translator. In addition to Mishol's Look There, she is the translator (with Shlomit Naor) of the forthcoming Approaching You in English (Zephyr Press), poetry with a focus on gender and religious practice by Admiel Kosman. She is the mother of two bilingual adults in their 20s.
