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Soldiers


ISSUE:  Summer 2008

What’s left behind us, what do we leave behind?
Land of long mourning
filled with quiet olives,
the shadow of mosques on the horizon, smoky skies.
Along the remote paths
wrecked by bombs
an exhausted convoy shuffles: tools of destruction
and then the young men. We don’t remember
the beautiful songs we once knew by heart.

In the conflicted past
blue shirts and red flags turned into one fabric
of lies. From the hill
where we stood, you can see
the secrets of destruction,
 sometimes

we still wonder why we insisted on keeping the human image we’ve lost.

—Translated by Lisa Katz

 
From: With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry, forthcoming from SUNY Press, Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzvia Back, editors

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