Will anyone return the sleepers from their dreams? Will anyone watch over their nightly unrest? Who will witness their struggles, and catch them as they fall? The artist remains awake as his loved ones are gathered, one by one, into the foreign nests of their sleep. The children are strange as birds, and their mothers also metamorphose. Each one into his own oblivion, the child into his own secret.  One is hid within another yet completely alien.

 

And the artist is watching. Since their years anticipate one another, night twists them in its own ways and veils their dreams under its dark wing. And all his sons are only sons. And each night we learn to fly, and our flight is heavy and clumsy until our wings wither mid-flight and our shadows appear in first light. And the artist welds together the shades to prolong our night and sows our hardships into the dwindling flesh of the night. He steals for us another moment; sheltering the son courting his mother, who fell asleep in the midst of song,  dropping a feather in his lap. Beneath his heavy eyelids he perceives his own plumed hands, and knows that again he will not fulfil his watch.

 

When sleep defeats him, night will be compelled to open its eyes. The birds will return with twigs in their beaks and cushion the nests they have built in our heads. Their art will meddle with our thoughts, and we might see tall trees spring as memory. Yakinton  is asleep. Good night. Have we been here before? A trained hand has turned our wishes into memories: pastel on paper. But we are already awake and they are still taken inwards with shut eyes. Distant ,as a deserted crib, still this night’s offsprings record every tremble of the lip and every murmur of the heart as our sleep gets lighter and lighter. We may wish to speak but images precede us. Our wings will not venture another flight, but their exhaustion will materialize  the bits of night that have stolen against the daybreak: charcoal on paper. And we will surrender our secret:

 

Your Face To My Face

 

Be to me

your face lovely

to my face.

 

Be to me

face to

face me.

 

Mouth to           

mouth. Sigh

to sigh

 

Oded Wolkstein

Translation by Leeron Tur-Kaspa

 

“Your Face to My Face”  by Avot Yeshurun

Translation by Gabriel Levin and Lilach Lachman