Tirzah Ben David

Tirzah Ben-David was born in 1949 in Liverpool, England, and read English Literature at Cambridge University.   After visiting Israel as a kibbutz volunteer she converted to Judaism in 1977 and received rabbinic ordination from Leo Baeck College, London in 1996.   She is a member of Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi and visiting rabbi to the Shir Hatzafon Progressive Jewish Community in Copenhagen.  Her first book of poetry 'Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute' was published in Britain in 1988.   Her second book 'Consider the Heroes' was published in Israel in 2005 in a bi-lingual edition by Gvanim, with Hebrew translation by the Israeli poet Oded Peled.  

The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

Tales of the Apocalypse I

 
'And the kings of ancient time were dead,
And their crowns were found no more:
And the earth was desolate"
   The Zohar: on failed creations.
 
Come, we can leave now
No one still needs us
Or covets the dust of us,
The tilt of our blood
In the cosmic slide,
The long slither down
Into silence
 
Voices stacked like coffins
In the streets:
Rifle them and move on
 
Our tall and mythic riding out
Defied the dawn,
Made stirrups of the wind,
Only the sea
Remembered we would die
 
And never wept for us
 
Anthills of tin in the final wilds,
Blisters of iron
Where our last grasp failed
 
And the sea a puddle
 
Grasshoppers met us,
Limping through the streets
Appease them: they are death
 
But nothing gave us pause:
The old myths of insanity
The laughter of the drowned
Persued us
As the colours died
 
God yawned:
The universe defaulted
Into dark,
And only the paler outline
Of our leaving
Lagged behind.

  

Tales of the Apocalypse II

Rumour having reached us
That the world stood still,
That the gibbet cranes of Babel
Swung unmanned
And Wall Street crashed
 
We were forced to reconsider our position,
To ponder the implications
Of an End,
Of a new broom sweeping history
Into heaps.
 
Wrestling reality from
The shapes of chance,
Translating an alien language
To find out who we are:
We tossed it all behind us
 
And suddenly smiled
 
Breathless, we touched
Our bodies' secret places,
Sprang the trap
That kept us in the dark
 
Our flight took shape
 
Unerring as moths
With the light on our wings,
With the deep sigh of rockets
Resigned to space
 
We began to be a presence
In the void.

  

Nomadic Museum
 
While we still lived
A little less each year
A little narrower
But lived
When someone had yet to tell us
We were gone
 
They had already glassed us in,
Pressed our hospitality
On strangers with polished shoes
 
Are we then a catalogue?
 
Item:
Feet
On the beaten urine-scented earth
The buttermilk at dawn
Tasting of creation mixed
With all God's tears
 
Item:
The old folk and the babies
Left in unmarked graves
Not for want of caring:
God when he needs to find them
Knows
 
Item:
Turban cloth
Like sand uncoiling in the wind,
White
Ochre
Indigo
The fretted colours of
A blanket or the noonday sky
Above a moving herd

 
Item:
A girl's shadow
On the pavement dancing
Danced
And gone.

 

Early Dark
 
Not here we said;
But over there
Where the hills fade
We fed them from the wild
 
The old gods
Before the night got in.
 
Never plotting their journeys,
Forbidden to dream their dreams,
Herding them at arm's length
As they chose
Clumsy and cunning
 
And so were we
And deserved each other.
 
We talked of course
Of new horizons
Bur here we are
Prodding at the tide
Watching while they idle
In the dusk.
 
No one comes to gaze at them
Or touch their feet:
They are old freight now,
Knacker's goods
 
Not even the dead remember them.
 
As for us,
We'll watch them go
From the warm and pungent
Place they left
 
Touched by sorrow
And the chill of early dark
When boats float home
From the sea.