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    Frayed Light
    Frayed Light
    Frayed Light
    Ebook88 pages35 minutes

    Frayed Light

    By Yonatan Berg

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider's perspective on life in Israel today.

    [Sample Text]

    Unity

    We travel the silk road of evening,
    tobacco and desire flickering
    between our hands. We are warm travelers,
    our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,
    in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.
    We break bread under the pistachio tree,
    under the Banyan tree, under the dark
    of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up
    in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel
    in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices
    announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops
    heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,
    with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,
    traveling with ardor in our loins, with the cry of birth.
    We sit crossed-legged within the rocking
    of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells
    of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel
    through eagles of death, dilution of earth in rivers,
    in eulogies, through marble, we travel through the silk
    of evening, our hearts like bonfires in the dark.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9780819579140
    Frayed Light
    Author

    Yonatan Berg

    Yonatan Berg is a leading Hebrew poet. He is the youngest recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize and a number of other national awards. He has published three books of poetry, one memoir and two novels. His latest book Frayed Light was published in 2019. His novel Far from the Linden Trees was published in 2018 and received excellent reviews. Yonatan Berg is a bibliotherapist and teaches creative writing in Jerusalem.

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      Book preview

      Frayed Light - Yonatan Berg

      Part I

      HANDS

      THAT

      ONCE

      HELD

      MANNA

      LETTER TO THE READER

      In conversations I cannot explain myself—still

      an erupting mass of arrogant youth: fruits of conflict

      with the body, an overflow of zeal trapped

      inside, a decisive lack of seriousness,

      traits acquired when I left

      the grim corridor, too brightly lit with mitzvoth.

      The constant urge to touch, I know,

      means always to be thirsty.

      I’m embarrassed by nudity, weeping, moments

      of pure stupidity, gatherings with a family

      that only asks to be left alone.

      I try, time after time

      to talk to the boy I could have been—

      the engaged one, the generous, self-controlled one who pauses

      before opening doors, allowing the dogs to run wild into the future.

      They bark, my faithful friends of heresy,

      of despair and self-denial, forever running inside me

      with crude enthusiasm. Now, so it seems,

      it’s too late to change, too late

      for caution. How I love the sound of glass

      hitting the floor of the room, yes, you know it—

      pushing through the midnight gate and beyond

      to the flat surface, the silvery one,

      the tired pipe organ of creation.

      I apologize to each and every one of you

      that I cannot touch, cannot reach out

      to ease your pain, cannot hold you to me,

      knowing I will ruin it all by saying something about the self—

      something too flowery, too sophisticated. That being the case,

      this letter becomes one blurry trail

      of what, at day’s end,

      I really wanted to whisper in your ear.

      UNITY

      We travel the silk road of evening,

      tobacco and desire flickering

      between our hands. We are warm travelers,

      our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

      in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

      We break bread under the pistachio tree,

      under the Banyan tree, under the dark

      of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up

      in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel

      in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices

      announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops

      heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world,

      with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire,

      traveling with ardour in our loins, with the cry of birth.

      We sit crossed-legged within the rocking

      of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells

      of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel

      through eagles of death, dilution of earth in rivers,

      in eulogies, through marble, we travel through the silk

      of evening, our hearts like bonfires in the dark.

      PARTICULAR TIMING

      Now my needy self, the wasted one, appears.

      Now to be the one who crosses the dirt track

      on his way to the ends of the evening, a boy

      escaping home, close to silence.

      Now to remember the young man entering

      the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,

      the smell of incense, the oil, flickering walls,

      the great theological ennui,

      the stones of the tomb

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