Abba Kovner (1918-1987) began writing poetry as a youth, but it wasn’t until after WWII that he became a poet in earnest. Rarely translated into English, Kovner was a complicated poet whose work requires serious reading for the unraveling of its multiplicity of layers and resonances. His style, born from trauma, reflects deep-seated dichotomies, both ideological and psychological, with which the poet struggled throughout his life. In every way, from how the poems sit on the page to their imagery and syntax, Kovner’s poems reveal the tensions of both losing and being lost. The dead haunt every one of these his poems: his mother, his brother, those lost in the ghetto and the partisans who fell beside him in the forest. Even in a lighter, recession-era poem like “The Brave Ones,” voices rise out of his neighbor’s shower drain. Those voices are the echoes of the time Kovner and his comrades spent in the sewers under Vilna as they escaped the city and made their way into the forest to join the Russian partisans. No one is forgotten in these poems and the mourning continued through Kovner’s life. Much like the poetry of Paul Celan, whose poetics were shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust, Kovner’s poetics is built of many unrevealed codes, repeated metaphors and a personal vocabulary aimed at both concealing and revealing his torn soul.
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The Brave Ones
1.
Finished showering. With pats of a squeegee,
my neighbor softly sweeps the remaining water
around the house. It is not my neighbor’s fault that
his drain is clogged and bubbles with trouble. It is not
his fault that sometimes his drain contains
the voices of the drowned.
Now he dries himself with little saw-like swipes.
He will immediately go over and turn off the lights
according to plan: Bathroom. Kitchen. Outside lights
and the fluorescent over the purple sofa and
over the Degas. Faithful
to the order of the hour left from life in a careful country,
he will turn off all his lights. Then his small
nightlight will arise, he’ll turn on the TV
at the lowest possible volume, and in his
beige slippers he will hone in on his armchair
step by step
so as not to scare his shadow.
2.
If I was like my neighbor
I would switch around the order: begin by turning on the TV. Then
the nightlight and the fluorescents and light the lights
outside and light up
the bathroom + kitchen + living room + alight
every room above and every light there is and and leave
on everylight and proceed to the shower.
And without undressing I’d stand in all my clothes
under the shower head and in the cold stream
and at my full height I would stand there singing
songs, songs from before, how I was
in the day after the many days from the day that
I first knew myself in the shower
and in my loudest off pitch voice
singing and sudsing
sudsing and singing
to the very end of my every childhood song
and scare my neighbors into understanding
how all of my ghosts witness this me.
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The Scientists Are Wrong
They are wrong, those scientists, the universe was not formed
billions of years ago.
The universe, as I understand it, is made anew every day.
These experts miscalculate when they argue
that this universe was formed
from a single primordial matter.
It’s my opinion that the world is created everyday
from all kinds of matter, each unrelated to the other
and their only correlation some quantitative relationship,
some quotient of weight and mass like
the foundations of sorrow and the infrastructure of hope,
mutating themselves into the mourners
of the brotherhood of language. I am sorry,
that its on me, with complete humility, to raise the alarm
about the sure and obvious conclusions of these physicists,
that there is no faster speed than the speed of light,
when I in my illuminated flesh
viewed from up close as something else completely
with velocities greater than that of light
that do return —
though not in a straight line, due to the curvature of the earth,
or perhaps the innocence of God —
and, if we join in some religious equation, maybe to understand
why I refuse to believe that your voice
and everything I’ve always cherished,
everything tangible and suddenly lost —
could just disappear off the face of the earth forever —
And yet, if still the world wasn’t built by us,
then blessed is He, day by day.