Cities: Selected Poems

Dedicated TO Malka Locker AND her family

This zine was created for the Jewish Museum’s Virtual Summer Institute

Translated BY Tyler Kliem

טצעזעגרעביא ןוֿפ רעלַײט

FOR THE Jewish Museum in New York

ןרַאֿפ

Original designs, photos, Yiddish typeface, AND translations

CREATED BY Tyler Kliem

BY Malka Locker

Source poetry in the Yiddish

Table of CONTENTS

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION In Silent Nights

All the Walls Are Here

Dolomites

The Coast of Tel Aviv

Our Kin Still Remains

Original INTRODUCTION

It’s not just about stones or things to say, or walls with ears and cities, alive — in the shocking dramatics of their formation. It was in New York, where the rhythm of the mechanical age engraved in itself a moderate constraint in my brain. It was in New York, where I tried to signal to these things, to become mellow with them — to become redeemed by them.

On foot, in the dust of a wide dirt road, I wandered from city to city and not once did I ever stand before a sealed gate with the Seven Seals.

That was a hard challenge. Such a trial collapsed on my soul like a stone block before the sculptor … with a thousand tempting possibilities, with all

its conventions and seductions. I needed my ear, the eye that listens intensively, until my hand could lift itself, paying no mind to its forms, containing all of purpose. And that was resplendent, just as it was unexpected.

It’s that feeling of overcoming, of solving a mystery, for which you can’t seem to protect yourself from cheerfully having a conundrum, tormenting you until completion, unless you find the solution. Before each phenomenon, you become dejected by a particular suitability earlier — not understandably — in which those unique things endure.

Nowhere in existence are there two cities which are them-

selves alike, even if they’ve become thrust under similar conditions, in the same era, under the same climate. Similar structures and parks which have no stories to tell. Too soon, you find out that every city carries within itself the mystery of human countenance, and you can either become attracted to it, or become dismissive of it. The city has the sweetish warmth of a human body seeping within it — the depths and range of a human soul. There are mazing streets and moral streets, both pert and pious, idyllic and heroic. Bridges that bind and the likes of which that draw apart. There are cemeteries. There don’t just exist places which certainly welcome the tired, that have brought an end to their journeys — no, there’s, of course, a corner to a street, a marketplace, a shul and a gateway that can never bring you to that uncertain Revelation — that reminds you that you are not alone, that there, moving past you, is a whole procession of generations that have since wandered by. Across every high wind, along every crushed wall that exists only as remnants, a thing of waste discharged from all that has struggled, which has suffered and endured for all of us.

And then, there’s the roar of the city — brash, scruffy — and that calm burst of desire, which has become enveloped, gaping in the modern rhythms of invention and progress.

And that which has called out midnight for the work of the Creator.

And bells … the quivering and fear which the bells have awoken. The pious procession with crucifix in hand, with desire of our Psalms written across our lips.

For the sounds of cities, I am truly afraid. A pickaxe chops more at everything in this stone cave, tempting this city with its desire, like a siren, enchanting everything that’s now surrendered to it, in all kinds of transformations.

In Silent NIGHTS

In silent nights, in strange cities I often roam, alone, I go. A white shadow slithers, stopping short. A white cloud in the void flaking off, winking, as lamps greet silence, settling, sinking.

All the ןענַײז ןרעױמ

All the walls are near and here beside me with all these inked pasts clung to their heart, old gates sullen ascending from their hinges, as my gentler step strongly anchors again to a doorstep marked of its journey …

Walls Are HERE

Here many have stood still flung deep under tears blossoming and many trees woven new with young greenery, dreamlike and brown earth drunk new of sap for the faithful to grow hushed-reborn power.

Dolomites

Steep and jagged the Dolomites do tower, weather-tanned, tin-lumped, their rough lace, sharpened, enclosed by a canal, blunt, gulched in gray haze on a whole afternoon …

It is reality, It is enduring, between mountains, the green eye, the pure sky lake, the cool rupture around the terrace, the balmy nights, in the mountains upon the sea, and those drowned streets with glory of anguish, endowed with a sheen …

Tulle falls, one after the next like creased scarves in the valley …

The sharpness becoming sharper, and the hardness harder …

The Coast

of TEL AVIV

At noon, the white sands glow in Tel Aviv and coarsely lying on the beach blistering, somewhat lazily a ship tugs from all a faroff place probably …

An anchor is tossed at the port, as sirens blare echoes, the sea gleaming in blueness, and white snakes kissing the coast, green isles of seaweed checking the sands through quiet obedience, pulling away and coming back while lying in the pits of noon …

Stubborned with precision a hammer strikes and the force slices open a rift in the lost embankment, splitting sounds, splitting sounds …

The dunes are hot and severed. And sand, gilded, gilded and flickering, clumped together and bit in two on the steepest cliff sitting still, rust-tousled, egg-powdered is the throat of an anchor, poking from its wall …

ענעגײא ןבילבעגיד

Our Kin Still REMAINS

I’m lingered singular, halfway between old-exalted trees, each day with them I’m altering in garments, sizings, things — yet our kin still remains.

Saps, seeds and the murmuring of matters and masses, of mods and meanderings, often fleeing from the valley — yet our kin still remains.

Each day with them I’m gathering, sunbeams and silence, at night and sea, abiding alone by the fear a caravan moving through the wild — yet our kin, our kin, still remains.

A stone often gabs to other stones and their meaning I cannot know, but I sense one and want to perceive and abide alone by the fear …

It sometimes appears that I draw closer — to glossy sparks, flying marks, with roots to all beginning. A tearful brother-cry to all beginning …