Poem

Navit Barel

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BLESSING

Only good things. Best wishes roll off your forked tongue
surrounding me, limp, to do me good.
Your evil eye sways the walls. There’s no
current from the fire. The world will end in this room.
I’ll still hear from you. I won’t escape. Then with a bang
mountains crumble, stairs collapse, every wall will
fall to the ground.

© Translation: 2013, Adam Seelig

BLESSING

© 2011, Navit Barel
From: Mamash
Publisher: Am Oved, Tel Aviv

Navit Barel

Navit Barel

Israeli poet Navit Barel, 36, was born in Ashkelon on Israel’s southern coast to bereaved parents, immigrants from Libya, now deceased, who had lost a son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “I grew up in a home in mourning; it was a complicated existence,” she told the Haaretz newspaper when her second book, Real, appeared in 2011. “I have no family, I have no one,” she told correspondent Maya Sela. “...

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BLESSING

Only good things. Best wishes roll off your forked tongue
surrounding me, limp, to do me good.
Your evil eye sways the walls. There’s no
current from the fire. The world will end in this room.
I’ll still hear from you. I won’t escape. Then with a bang
mountains crumble, stairs collapse, every wall will
fall to the ground.

© 2013, Adam Seelig
From: Mamash

BLESSING

Only good things. Best wishes roll off your forked tongue
surrounding me, limp, to do me good.
Your evil eye sways the walls. There’s no
current from the fire. The world will end in this room.
I’ll still hear from you. I won’t escape. Then with a bang
mountains crumble, stairs collapse, every wall will
fall to the ground.

© 2013, Adam Seelig

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