These notebooks, these notebooks!
Poetry is no substitute for survival.
In the books beside my bed
I used up my will like an alphabet.
Something mechanical and obsolete
is sawing up my heart with the blades
of those invisible wheels which kept
our grandfathers’ airplanes aloft.
Is it a g-d who punishes,
is it a woman who pleases?
I admire riders of the immaculate molecule,
I crash in a heavy machine.
Arrogant as a farmer who won’t
follow his children into the slums,
sometimes I believe I alone colonize
the sky with a handful of seeds.
I don’t like the price of a belief.
Every g-d is jealous.
I am no parliamentarian
and there are no favourites of the Queen.
1966