Rotating the Record

Hgit Grossman

Translation into English: Benjamin Balint

 

All day the record rotated around itself

No whisper was heard

In the heart of grooved silence its sorrows swarmed

And were scratched from the soft needle.

All day the wheel circled, and no one knew,

The sun rose, a clear crescent moon climbed above the city.

A noise-spiked electricity streamed into the vein

Outside the sun ate into the roofs of heads

The hairs split in disbelief:

What is body and what is soul.

The fainting was a family relative,

That gave no more room in the mist,

Since weakness exceeded the law

And strength is running out.

Computerized clicking penetrated what was disconnected,

The room filled with dim creatures,

There was no place to move

In the midst of the vacuum and sounds of distant conversation.

All day the record rolled around itself

At the end of the songs and at center of the narrow route

No one knew why no sound was heard

And electricity streamed into the black circle’s pit,

We could pause in amazement:

How could we not hear that the cycle persists?

The sun drank up the oxygen through a straw of gray towers,

The words no longer touched one another,

Numb youth lost in the streets,

Their faces white like skulls,

They stopped at the corner and waited for something to pound them into movement,

An unseeing car passed in the hot wind

And the night postponed its appearance.

 

 

 

poet writes in Hebrew