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