Yiddish Songs

A sober dawn will turn from the Sturm und Drang
Of New Year’s Eve; the crush of bodies lit
With spotlights on the Rynek. Snowflakes hang

Like Christmas decorations, delicate
And almost plastic, waiting to be wrapped
In plain brown paper. The fiery spirit

Of intoxicated breath hovers, trapped
In a frozen maze of strobe lights from the stage.
Is this what the labour of the Concept

Birthed—a peacock’s narcissistic plumage?
I am standing on a balcony, drunk;
Pure spirits have made way for the vintage

Maudlin blood. Inside, crystal glasses clink,
As lips of strangers from around the world
Pass briefly like the twin hands of a clock.

Rilke stood on a balcony, was called;
Although it took him ten years to submit
To the dark thorn that blossomed in his blood.

But that was Rilke. Lesser men commit
Theft on rich echoes, pick the pockets of
The drunken stairwells on Józefa street.

Night marches in formation through Kraków.
Crushed stars of frost sing in the cobbled drains.
Silent facades. No one asks me to prove

My bona fides, my right to these remains,
These personal effects, if I can pay
The steep prices of the antiquarians,

Who hoard their bric-a-brac in narrow, grey
Alcoves between quaint cafes and hostels:
A frock coat from the nineteenth century

Heavy with smoke, lined with the orphaned smells
Of the dead; a battered case that inters
A fiddle without strings; the musty sheols

And claustrophobia of hanging furs.
Outside the bells ring out for Latin Mass,
And bent, old women count the change of prayers.

The Book of Comfort says ‘all flesh is grass’.
I cannot understand these words. The scythe
Still grinds against the cornerstones. Moses

Ascends the barren, thunder-shrouded path
To argue with his God, work out a truce.
The wagon rolls to market with its calf.

Death deals the cards out, thumbs each shuffled face,
To play his patient game of solitaire,
Arranging fates in hierarchies of race.

The naked trees along the Wisła stare
Into the darkness of the other shore,
Where lights of houses slowly disappear.

Tomorrow morning, at first light, I’m sure
I’ll take my place among the ones who walk
Between the toppled stones, where flowers stir

In chains of snow, and talk the empty talk
Of the long-distance railway passenger.
And I will read, upon the brazen plaque,

How shards of graves were used during the war
To pave camp roads—dark exodus that scuffed
The fiery alphabet of graven law.

And I will look intently, with the soft
Sincerity of an unfocused lens,
At the broken tablets. Then having doffed

The clip-on yarmulke, I’ll meet with friends
At the Galicia Museum hall
To see a beautiful young woman, who bends

Briefly beneath the shadow of a shawl—
Black as the wind that blows all-widowing;
Breath of an angel ashen, terrible—

To hear her clear voice sing in Yiddish; sing
Bolt upright as a flamenco dancer—
That matador of grief—the lonely ring

Of light, and darkness of applause around her.

Jakob Ziguras

“Yiddish Songs” was published in Meanjin 70:3, in 2011.

The author’s book of poems Chains of Snow can be purchased directly through the Pitt Street Poetry website: http:http://pittstreetpoetry.com/jakob-ziguras/.