Every eye shines with fixed waiting

and for the word “when?”

Here there are few soldiers.

Only the shot-down birds tell of war.

You believe every bit of news you hear.

The buildings now are fuller,

Body smelling close to body,

And the garrets scream with light for long, long hours.

This evening I walked along the street of death.

On one wagon, they were taking the dead away.

Why so many marches have been drummed here?

Why so many soldiers?

Then

A week after the end,

Everything will be empty here.

A hungry dove will peck for bread.

In the middle of the street will stand

An empty, dirty

Hearse.

To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We’ve suffered here more than enough,

Here in this clot of grief and shame,

Wanting a badge of blindness

To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp

From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,

Another way,

Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don’t scream and the guns don’t bark

And you don’t see blood here.

Nothing, only silent hunger.

Children steal the bread here and ask and ask

and ask

And all would wish to sleep, to keep silent, and 

just to go to sleep again...

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads

To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.

Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

against a white stone…

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ‘way up high.

It went away I’m sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don’t live here,

in the ghetto.