Home

by Uvi Poznansky



  Home

  Uvi Poznansky

  Zeev Kachel

  Home ©2012

  Uvi Poznansky, Zeev Kachel

  All rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,

  including information storage and retrieval system,

  without the written permission of the publisher,

  except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Uviart

  P.O. Box 3233 Santa Monica CA 90408

  Blog: uviart.blogspot.com Website: uviart.com

  Email: uvi@uviart.com

  First Edition 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design, cover design, cover image and illustrations by

  Uvi Poznansky

  Library of Congress Control Number:  2012915617

  ISBN: 978-09849932-3-9

  ASIN: B00960TE3Y

  Contents

  Uvi Poznansky

  Home

  This is the Place

  Muse

  A Sentence, Unfinished

  His First Home

  A Child on a Wagon

  A Heartbeat, Reversed

  And Then She Left Him

  Blade

  Even One Mark

  Don’t Open Your Eyes

  This Tissue Is Me

  Be Still, A Poet’s Heart

  A Diamond Short, A Decade Late

  Zeev Kachel

  Reparations

  We Were Born in Darkness

  After You’ve Gone

  Childhood Years

  My Teachers

  Fall

  Memory

  Every Day I Tear A Leaf

  She and I

  Lie to Me

  I Forgive you Everything

  Don’t be a Judge

  Weep, My Heart

  Not to Think

  I’m Not Sorry

  Not One is Home

  Your Advocate, Your Voice

  My Girl of Innocence, from Time to Time

  My Ties Unhitched

  We Met Here

  Somewhere There

  In My Dream I Hear

  Another Time

  Never have the Days

  We Pass

  Glass Eyes

  Not in Good Spirits

  Crossroad

  No Need to Worry Anymore

  A Different Man

  Everything has Long Lost its Weight

  Should I Fall

  Now I Cry

  When Life Becomes a Curse

  Without a Compass

  The Wolf

  The Easiest Demise

  Bent Over Memories

  I Plucked a Wildflower

  The Heart of Space

  I Live Here on Paint and on Toxoid

  The Time is Near

  Fall

  Autumn’s Gold

  On My Body

  Tired of Fighting

  It All Passes

  Maybe

  Perhaps

  Maybe

  Vigil Light

  A Memorial

  A Lone Wolf

  Time Crawls Slowly

  Fantasy

  Blessed

  In a Dark Night with not a Friend

  I Am

  About the Cover & Illustrasions

  About This Book

  About Zeev Kachel

  About Uvi Poznansky

  A Note to the Reader

  Bonus Excerpt: A Peek at Bathsheba

  Bonus Excerpt: A Favorite Son

  Bonus Excerpt: Apart From Love

  Books by Uviart

  Apart From Love

  The David Chronicles

  Rise to Power

  A Peek at Bathsheba

  The Edge of Revolt

  A Favorite Son

  Twisted

  Home

  Jess and Wiggle

  Now I Am Paper

  Uvi Poznansky

  Poems and Prose

 

  Home

  Uvi Poznansky, 20121

  Sucked in by a force, I'm flying through a tunnel

  The tunnel of memory that leads me back home

  The past blurs my present, so my vision is double

  The walls and the ceiling curve into a dome

  From here I can see my home, tilting

  And falling from place, all the lamps are aflame

  My father's empty chair is slowly ascending

  Tipped by the light, outlining its frame

 

  This is the Place

  Uvi Poznansky, 2012

  This is the place where he put pen to paper...

  But clung to the wall, the shelves are now bare

  All that remains of his words is but vapor

  All you can spot is but a dent in his chair  

  He used to sit here, here he would stare

  Years come, years go, an old clock keeping score,

  He would scribble his notes, crumple them in despair

  Waiting for his savior—but locking that door

  That door sealed him off, away from all danger

  Except from the depth of the danger within

  No one could intrude here, except for the stranger

  Who would carry him off to where his end would begin—

  The poet, who’d mourned the loss of his mother

  Would then, somehow, be reduced to a child

  He would crouch at the threshold, and call, call, call, call her

  Knock, knock, knock at the door; no more held back, but wild

  This is the place where he put pen to paper

  Till the door opened, creaking on a hinge...

  Locked in embrace, perhaps at last he can feel her

  No need to cry now, can't feel that twinge

 

  Muse

  Uvi Poznansky, 2012

  The lamp swings like a pendulum

  Pictures sway on their nails

  Then slip down the walls, leaving scratched trails

  Amidst the quake, the grief, the confusion and scare

  Slowly ascending is my father's armchair

  And beyond all these outlines of what I see there

  Beyond the sofa, the knickknacks, the old furniture

  Light pours in, and it paints something new

  It reveals, it unveils at this moment a clue

  The clue to a presence only he could once see

  A presence he longed for, because only she

  Could call him back home, and envelop him so

  Touching-not-touching, her hands all aglow

  These pages, upon which he'll never scribble a line

  Are floating out of shadows, into the shine

  Only she can now read the blanks, she and no other

  He's ascending into the arms of his muse, his mother.

  A Sentence, Unfinished

  Uvi Poznansky, 2004

  At this moment, a man is lying in his armchair, propped up on a large pillow. He has lived, or rather, has confined himself within these walls for decades, for a reason unknown. In this stagnant place all sounds are muffled, all images erased—but for one thing: his youth. There is a vibrant longing in him for the adventures of his early days. 

  Was it not just yesterday when he left his home in Poland, never to see his parents again?  Has he not escaped from the Nazi death camp in France, climbed across the Pyrenean Mountains, and found his way to Spain? He can still spot the snow-covered trail winding down, shining in the mist. It is fading out now, vanishing into a cloud, into fog. 

  No, it is not fog anymore but a storm, a raging storm at sea. There he stands, aboard the deck of a small ship, straining to see the dreamy
outline of a new shore: Israel. There is a certain glint, the vivid, restless glint of the wanderer, playing in his eyes. 

  It is high noon, but the room is dark. The blinds are drawn. Only a thin plume of daylight reaches in somehow, and writes a bright dot against the shadows. If—like him—you waited long enough, you could actually see the dot bleeding slowly, steadily across the bare floor, rising up over the wall, becoming longer and longer still, until at long last it would fade out, like a sentence unfinished. 

  Dark circles can be noticed around his eyes; which suddenly brings to mind a tired animal, one that has not felt sunshine for a long time. The eyelids fall shut and at once, the glint is gone. An invisible hand is writing on the wall. He knows it in his heart. He bears it in fear and silence.

  And then, trying to ignore the ticking, the loud, insistent ticking of the clock from the adjacent kitchen, you too would, perhaps, start sensing a presence. Voices would be coming from a different place, a place within. A faint footfall… A soft laughter... Who is there? He glances nervously at the entrance door. Is it locked? Can a stranger get in? Then—quite unexpectedly—the fear subsides and for the first time, gives way to something else. Something wells up in his throat. Why, why is the door locked?

  He feels a sudden urge to crawl down, get to that threshold, and cry. Mommy! Open the door! Let me in, mommy! Let me come home! But for now, he can still hold it in. He forces himself to turn away from that door. Somehow it feels lighter in the dark. The bareness of this space, which was once adorned with rich Persian rugs, colorful oil paintings and fine furnishings, is more bearable this way. So is the weight of loneliness.

  Opposite from him, playing out endlessly, unintelligibly and in quick succession on the TV screen, are strange images from unfamiliar places. Noise. He lets the images come. He lets them go. He has no will. He has no curiosity. But from time to time he stirs, despite the sharp, sudden pain in his wrist. He fumbles at the remote control, wondering why the sound is so distant, so mute. And yet—no matter how much he tries—he finds it impossible to fix that which is broken. The shelves behind him are laden with books, three of which he has written himself in years past. Signed: Blue Wolf.

  Here is the poet, a man notorious for his contradictions, a man of a great passion and an equally great skill to capture it, to put it in beautiful, eloquent words in any one of ten languages. Here is the storyteller whose listeners have left him. Locked in a world of no sound, in a world of no expression, here he is: a cage within cage. This is the place where even the wolf surrenders. The fight is over. No more howling. 

  Here, at last, is my father. 

  His First Home

  Uvi Poznansky, 2004

  Here is the place—he can bring it back—his first home. 

  Straight ahead is the door with a big handle high above. He can easily reach it, standing on the tips of his toes and pushing, pushing forward. It opens! Here is the room, which he shares with his sister, Batia. He is three yours old; she is five. And somehow he knows: she will come in later, much later. He can climb into bed now. Sleep is coming; he can feel it. Sleep is almost here. 

  It weighs heavily on his lids, but—for just a second—he can lift his dreamy gaze and look up at the painted ceiling. Half of it is night, with a large crescent moon surrounded by a swirl of stars, the other half—day, with a bright, yellow sun. He rubs his eyes, astonished. Nothing like this has ever happened before: They stir! The sun, the moon and the glowing stars—they all seem to move, seem to turn overhead... 

  Then, all of the sudden, amidst the glow, he finds himself standing at the banks of a lake with his daddy. He lets go of his daddy’s hand, flings a stone and at once he can spot—right there, in the middle of the lake—a ripple taking shape. One circle rises magically inside another, widening, riding out farther and farther until at long last it fades out. White lilies can be seen floating all around. One of them is right here, at arms reach. Only a thin line, the line of illusion, separates the petal from its white reflection. And underneath it, schools of golden fish scurry in one direction, then take a sharp turn and flow elsewhere. 

  And from somewhere in the distance he can hear a shrill sound: the whistle of a train. Soon, Zeev knows, it will go out of earshot again, as the train travels past the hills, going away on its mysterious journey, calling him to come, calling him to follow.

  A Child on a Wagon

  Uvi Poznansky, 2004

  There he sits, pressed in between bundles and things that keep rattling around him, on top of a horse-driven wagon. Looking up at his parents he can sense something big, something fearful and unspoken casting a shadow over them; and they bend their heads together over him and his sister. He can see an endless line in front, an endless line in back—horses and wagons, wagons and horses as far as the eye can see—all advancing towards the same gray, unclear horizon, all escaping towards the same destination: Unknown.

  The sun rises in front of the wagons, and sets behind them. Towns appear and disappear. Rivers pass by, then forests, brick houses, motels. In Minsk they stop. He finds the three-story hotel quite fascinating at first, especially the curved rail of the staircase, which is meant, no doubt, for sliding down and yelling at the top of your voice. Of course, landing down on your butt, he finds out, is an entirely different matter—and so is the harsh, unforgiving look cast down at him by the hotelkeeper.

  They settle down for the night. In the rented room, his mommy blesses the Sabbath candles. Her hands are tightly clasped, her eyes closed. And early the next morning they mount the wagon again, and the journey goes on in the dim light, guided by nothing but an instinct to survive, farther and farther away from home. Squinting at the rising sun, Zeev finds it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. His mind is going numb listening to the wheels as they spin and turn, spin and turn, beating incessantly against the mud.

  Cold rain starts coming down at him, sheet after sheet, and streaming in the same direction is the wet mane of the horse. Its head keeps bobbing up and down, up and down in front. When will it end? Where can they go?

  Many days pass by—he cannot count them any more—until, one evening, as they travel along the river, a big town comes into view, closer and closer against the smoky blue backdrop of the Ural Mountains.

  This, his daddy tells him, is Saratov.