I shall never have any fear of love, 
Not of its depth nor its uttermost height,
Its exquisite pain and its terrible delight.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never hesitate to go down
Into the fastness of its abyss
Nor shrink from the cruelty of its awful kiss.
I shall never have any fear of love.

Never shall I dread love’s strength
Nor any pain it might give.
Through all the years I may live
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never draw back from love
Through fear of its vast pain
But build joy of it and count it again.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never tremble nor flinch
From love’s moulding touch:
I have loved too terribly and too much
Ever to have any fear of love.

^{translated from the Yiddish by Daniel Kraft}

I write a poem for my unwritten poems,
for those that lie still in the rigid rest of nothingness,
as in the rest of reason—unemerged ideas.

How good the word is that has not yet been pronounced,
growing to its maturity in beds of silence
like the corn kernel in the field. 
Tomorrow perhaps the sun will crawl out
from the wind-swept, snowed-in heights,
and the seed
and the word
will rise into the blossoming beauty
of visible being.
Tomorrow perhaps there will be pain in the renewed white heat
of spring’s ascent towards bloom.

How good the kernel is,
that hibernates through years’ becoming
in the peace of its own essence,
beneath the earth,
like the bear after months of sleep— 
waiting, expecting
to awaken.

^{translated from the Yiddish by Daniel Kraft}

Dear mother, dear mother, I saw you from afar today,
you stood with your siddur and prayed for all of us
across these distances, your prayer was borne across the seas,
and like Noah’s blue dove your prayer brought me a leaf …

I spread it on my heart and wrote my poem on it
of my solitude, of my sadness by dawn and night;
not much remains of my unlived life,
in the flood of people I am but a single tear …

I’d write and write, but probably you’d weep
if I told everything to you about my sorrow in these quiet nights.
Across the seas and distances, my poem comes to you.
It will kiss your old siddur, and weave itself into your prayer …

Ellis Island, November 1938
 

Love me stupid.
Love me terrible.
And when I am no
mountain but rather
a monsoon of imperfect
thunder love me. When
I am blue in my face
from swallowing myself
yet wearing my best heart
even if my best heart
is a century of hunger
an angry mule breathing
hard or perhaps even
hopeful. A small sun.
Little & bright.

In the beginning there was only the moonlight
and the rain

and the mud that was left once the rain had stopped
and the footprints left in the mud

made by my boots from when
outside in the rain I had stood

beside the gate through the whole storm
watching out into the nothing that was on the other side of the fence

and once the rain had passed and I had trudged indoors
dredging the mud across my floors and it was

only the moonlight and an inch of rainwater
collecting in my footprints in the yard and also

upon the thin bodies of the night blooming flowers
from out in the distance

the animals began
talking with the world

and I lay in my bed by the open window listening
to that world being born out there

and I watched the swans drop
from the dark air

to fold the lights of the night sky
into the down of their once soaring backs

and that’s when you came home to find me upstairs
asleep

having tried so hard to stay awake but failing
and you woke me with what I know not

the harshest softness
or the most careful of violence

and your face was the first thing that I saw
in the familiar light of this new place

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have 
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.