100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  With disbelief I touch the cold marble,

  with disbelief I touch my own hand.

  It—is, and I—am in ever novel becoming,

  while they are locked forever and ever

  in their last word, their last glance,

  and as remote as Emperor Valentinian

  or the chiefs of the Massagetes, about whom I know nothing,

  though hardly one year has passed, or two or three.

  * * *

  I may still cut trees in the woods of the far north,

  I may speak from a platform or shoot a film

  using techniques they never heard of.

  I may learn the taste of fruits from ocean islands

  and be photographed in attire from the second half of the century.

  But they are forever like busts in frock coats and jabots in some monstrous encyclopedia.

  * * *

  Sometimes when the evening aurora paints the roofs in a poor street

  and I contemplate the sky, I see in the white clouds

  a table wobbling. The waiter whirls with his tray

  and they look at me with a burst of laughter

  for I still don’t know what it is to die at the hand of man,

  they know—they know it well.

  Warsaw, 1944

  “Café,” which Miłosz translated himself, is the fourth poem in “Voices of Poor People,” a six-part sequence of moral outrage and loss included in Rescue (Ocalenie, 1945), one of the first books printed in postwar Poland. The poem is written in a clear-cut, fairly plain-style free verse. Like other Polish poets of his generation and the half-generation that followed, which included Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisława Szymborska, Miłosz distrusted so-called pure poetry—that is, poetry that turns away from the world, that seeks, as the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé put it, “to purify the language of the tribe.” As Witold Gombrowicz formulates it in his witty and influential polemic “Against Poets,” “The minute the poets lost sight of a concrete human being and became transfixed with abstract Poetry, nothing could keep them from rolling down the incline into the chasm of the absurd.” Miłosz put human beings at the center of his work and committed himself to a forthright and seemingly guileless language that could communicate directly. “Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. / I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words,” he tells a dead friend in his poem “Dedication.”

  Miłosz chose a rather unassuming title, “Café,” which serves both as the poem’s initial setting and as an indelible vision at the end of the poem. Cafés, especially those deemed “artistic” cafés, were important local gathering places for Polish poets, writers, artists, and intellectuals of all sorts in the interwar period. The first three-line sentence explains the significance of this unnamed café: “Of those at the table in the café / where on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanes / I alone survived.” Notice the suspenseful effect Miłosz achieves by first populating the café with “those at the table,” then providing a luminous visual detail, the noon frost on the windowpanes. Only in the third line does Miłosz’s speaker reveal the fact that “I alone survived.” This simple, poignant declaration echoes the announcement in Job 1:15 made by a messenger who has witnessed a massacre: “And I alone have escaped to tell you.” In referencing this passage, Miłosz posits himself as a messenger, the sole survivor of a massacre, who must relate the story to others. The stanza ends with another three-line sentence, this one in the conditional tense: “I could go in there if I wanted to.” It suggests the ability to enter a place his friends can no longer enter. However, he knows that if he went inside, his fingers would touch only “a chilly void” and he would summon only “shadows.”

  In the second stanza the speaker is suddenly inside the café, perhaps in his imagination, where “with disbelief” he touches “the cold marble” of the table and, implicitly, the tomb. He then touches his own hand, as if estranged from his own body, from his own physical warmth. Notice how the following line stutters and interrupts itself when the speaker tries to express the astonishment of his continuing existence, separating the personal pronoun from the “to be” verbs with dashes and a comma—“It—is, and I—am.” He sees his hand’s presence and his own presence in the world as in a constant state of flux, “in ever novel becoming,” which he differentiates from his friends’ absence from the world, which he sees as static, since “they are locked forever and ever / in their last word, their last glance,” frozen in their youthful identities. They have become as distantly historical as the fourth-century Roman emperor Valentinian or the little-known, ancient nomadic tribe of the Massagetes, though only a short time has passed.

  In the third stanza the speaker lists some of the things he might do in the future, such as cutting lumber, giving a speech, making a movie, or learning the taste of exotic fruits. He repeatedly uses the modal verb “may,” which indicates not only what he might do, if he feels like it, but also what he can do, what being alive allows him to do. The last activity on the list, being “photographed in attire from the second half of the century,” contrasts with the image of his dead friends as “busts in frock coats and jabots in some monstrous encyclopedia.” While his photograph would show him dressed in up-to-date fashions, his friends’ encyclopedia entry depicts them as statues cut off at the shoulders and absurdly dressed in out-of-date frock coats and jabots, those decorative cloth pieces worn at the throat by men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  After this chilling image of anachronistic busts in the encyclopedia of the dead, the last stanza begins with the vibrant image of a colorful evening sunset that “paints the roofs in a poor street.” When the speaker looks at the sky, he sees “in the white clouds / a table wobbling.” Just as he does in the first stanza with “I alone survived,” Miłosz waits to reveal what the speaker sees in the clouds by enjambing lines 2 and 3 to startling effect, bringing the café back into the poem. There’s a wonderful aural and associative subtlety in the linking of “white clouds” and “a table wobbling.” Notice the repetition of w, t, and l sounds in both phrases, as well as the visual image of the table’s unmentioned white tablecloth; the white clouds must have reminded him of it. Czesław Miłosz elaborates on this vision, repeating some of the same sounds in “The waiter whirls with his tray.” The next line, where his friends regard him “with a burst of laughter,” seems to add lively detail to this whimsical scene. However, the enjambment after “laughter” dramatically changes the tone, as the laughter and the café scene vanish into the final two lines of the poem: “for I still don’t know what it is to die at the hand of man, / they know—they know it well.”

  Whereas “Café” begins at a café where the speaker’s friends are present only as potentially summoned shadows, the poem ends at another café, where the speaker is an outsider. He cannot join his friends at the table because of his ignorance of a certain type of death, “at the hand of man,” and their intimate knowledge of it; this forms a barrier between them that cannot be crossed. Though his friends have gained a bitter wisdom that the speaker lacks, they paid for it with their lives.

  Kadya Molodowsky

  * * *

  “Merciful God”

  (1945)

  The Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky was born in 1894 in Bereza Kartuska, a shtetl in White Russia. She participated fully in Jewish literary life, first in Warsaw, Poland, where she lived from 1921 to 1935, teaching Yiddish and Hebrew and publishing four collections of poems. After a move to New York City she supported herself by writing for the Yiddish press. She was a rebellious modernist who showed great sympathy for “all impoverished women who scour burnt pots” (“Poor Women”) and a feminist who defied traditional roles and considered herself an exiled outsider.

  Because she was living in the United States, Molodowsky was not caught directly in the maelstrom of the Holocaust, as were the Jewish poets Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, or Avrom Sutzke
ver, for example. However, because of her close identification with the Jews and the Jewish culture of eastern Europe, she felt a deep personal anguish about the events unfolding in the fall of 1944. “The bitter news about khurbm poyln [the destruction of Poland] began to arrive,” she wrote in her autobiography. “In agitation, I began to tear at the fingers of my hands. One finger became so badly infected that it required surgery.”

  The unthinkable hatred that was fueling the mass destruction of people and cities altered the very lens through which Jews viewed the world. Molodowsky describes this sweeping shift in perspective in her introduction to a book of Yiddish Holocaust poetry: “All our concepts changed: concepts of earth and heaven, and of the human being; we even perceived nature differently. The foundations of the world changed their forms.” The poet responded to the Holocaust and its devastating aftermath with a singular book of poems, Only King David Remained (Der meylek Dvid akleyn iz geblibn), which Molodowsky called “a tombstone for a life that had vanished.” As she explained in her collection of khurbm-lider (poems lamenting the destruction), “I saw in succession before my eyes a Jewish world that had been destroyed, Jewish cities, destruction and pain. I gave this book the name Only King David Remained, in order to say that the Jewish people was no more, all that remained was King David alone with his sorrow-crown on his head.”

  The book sets a defiant and sardonic tone by beginning with the poem “Merciful God” (“El khanun”).

  Merciful God

  Merciful God,

  Choose another people,

  Elect another.

  We are tired of death and dying,

  We have no more prayers.

  Choose another people,

  Elect another.

  We have no more blood

  To be a sacrifice.

  Our house has become a desert.

  The earth is insufficient for our graves,

  No more laments for us,

  No more dirges

  In the old, holy books.

  * * *

  Merciful God,

  Sanctify another country,

  Another mountain.

  We have strewn all the fields and every stone

  With ash, with holy ash.

  With the aged,

  With the youthful,

  And with babies, we have paid

  For every letter of your Ten Commandments.

  * * *

  Merciful God,

  Raise your fiery brow,

  And see the peoples of the world—

  Give them the prophecies and the Days of Awe.

  Your word is babbled in every language—

  Teach them the deeds,

  The ways of temptation.

  * * *

  Merciful God,

  Give us simple garments

  Of shepherds with their sheep,

  Blacksmiths at their hammers,

  Laundry-washers, skin-flayers,

  And even the more base.

  And do us one more favor:

  Merciful God,

  Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius.

  (Translated by Kathryn Hellerstein)

  The poem’s title comes from the term El khanun (“Merciful God” or “God of Mercy”), which most notably appears in Exodus 34:6–7. After God has made a covenant with Moses, the people violate it by worshiping a golden calf, a betrayal known in rabbinic literature as “that deed.” In his rage for this act of rebellion God destroys the original tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. However, when Moses intervenes on the people’s behalf, God allows him to carve a second set of tablets; God then descends to him in a cloud and addresses him, describing Himself as merciful:

  And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,

  Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin . . .

  This passage became known as the “Shlosh-esrei Middot” (“Thirteen Attributes of God”), which are recited or chanted on many Jewish holidays, as well as while the Torah is being taken from the ark for that day’s procession and reading, to enable Jews of any era to renew their covenant with God.

  Each stanza in Molodowsky’s poem begins with the apostrophe “Merciful God.” An apostrophe is a mode of direct address; the poet turns to address a God or gods, the muse, a dead or absent person, a natural object, a thing, an imaginary quality or concept. Starting the poem with “Merciful God” sets up the expectation that, as in a typical prayer, the speaker will be asking God for something uplifting, like compassion, patience, peace, or strength. However, in the second and third lines, Molodowsky upends this expectation by asking God to “Choose another people, / Elect another.” She makes this startling request on behalf of Jews because “We are tired of death and dying.” The rest of the poem is an argument against, and a rejection of, the covenant of Exodus, which has brought unthinkable misery to the Jewish people. To be chosen, to be sanctified or made holy, is to be cursed, and she beseeches God to choose someone else.

  The entire poem overflows with the language of diminishment, annihilation, and exhaustion. It is also filled with references to the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. After the horrors of World War II, the Jews have been utterly depleted, in body and in spirit. “We have no more prayers”; “We have no more blood / To be a sacrifice.” In an implicit reference to the House of Israel, which in Exodus represents God’s covenant with the chosen people, she declares, “Our house has become a desert.” So many people have died, “The earth is insufficient for our graves.” The speaker wants nothing more from God, “No more laments,” “No more dirges.” Sacred elements of Jewish tradition that God granted the Jews following their covenant—“the old, holy books,” “the prophecies and the Days of Awe,” “the deeds / The ways of temptation”—she wants God to give to “another country, / Another mountain,” “the peoples of the world.”

  Alluding to the crematoria of the Holocaust, the speaker declares, “We have strewn all the fields and every stone / With ash, with holy ash.” The purposeful addition here of “holy ash” emphasizes the poet’s conclusion that God’s sanctification of the Jewish people has brought them to ruin. She points out the unacceptable price of having accepted this covenant, whose very language ironically includes the command not to kill: “With the aged, / With the youthful, / And with babies, we have paid / For every letter of your Ten Commandments.”

  In the concluding stanza, Molodowsky’s speaker rejects the tradition in Jewish culture of a special calling to scholarly pursuits and the life of the mind; instead, she asks God to let the so-called Chosen People become un-chosen, ordinary people who work with their hands as “shepherds with their sheep, / Blacksmiths at their hammers, / Laundry-washers, skin-flayers.” The poem ends, like Alfonsina Storni’s “I’m Going to Sleep,” with the speaker making a last request: “And do us one more favor: / Merciful God, / Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius.” Rather than ask God to bless her people, she requests deprivation, her final renunciation of that special, chosen status, which was seen as the “genius” of the Jewish people.

  Molodowsky’s poem, which she deliberately dated 1945, is a prayer to end all prayers, since her last request asks God to withdraw, thus negating any need for additional prayer. Oddly, even somewhat wittily, in all her bitter weariness she never seems to doubt the existence of God, an irony that places her in a long counter-tradition of Jewish lamentations that curse God while continuing to evoke Him. Her poem thus becomes what the scholar David Roskies labels “a sacred parody.” As the translator and critic Kathryn Hellerstein puts it, “Molodowsky thus responds to the destruction of European Jewry with her own act of annihilation.” If God’s power is to offer a holy covenant to the Jewish people, Molodowsky uses her power in “Merciful God” to break that covenant, not by worshiping a false idol, but by refusing the covenant itself.

  Primo Levi

  * * *

  �
�Shemà”

  (1946)

  The Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi wrote this poem on January 10, 1946, when the Nuremberg Trials were gathering momentum. He first called it “Psalm” and used it, untitled, as the epigraph to his first book, If This Is a Man (Se questo e un uomo, 1947), a memoir chronicling the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz. He took the memoir’s title from the fifth line in the poem, “Consider if this is a man.” When Levi republished the poem in August 1964, he changed its title to “Shemà.” The poem could also serve as an epigraph to his entire poetic oeuvre, which is filled with a rage and desperation often tempered in the rest of his work:

  Shemà

  You who live safe

  In your heated houses

  You who come home at night to find

  Hot food and friendly faces:

  * * *

  Consider if this is a man,

  Who toils in the mud

  Who knows no peace

  Who fights for half a loaf

  Who dies at a yes or a no.

  Consider if this is a woman,

  With no hair and no name

  With no more strength to remember

  With empty eyes and a womb as cold

  As a frog in winter.

  * * *

  Ponder that this happened:

  I consign these words to you.

  Carve them into your hearts