Together in the pot
With our lives
Chopped like onions.
Let it rain, let it snow.
Dead people’s wedding pictures
Make a hearty soup.
The soup of strays
Roaming the world
In search of their master.
The soup of orphans
Wiping their red noses
On the black armband on their sleeves.
The soup loved by flies.
On what shall we cook it?
On the mustache of Joseph Stalin.
The fires of Treblinka.
The fires of Hiroshima.
The head of the one about to be shot.
The head swarming with memories.
Let’s cook it until we see in its steam
Our sweethearts’ white bodies.
They are huge, they are voluptuous,
They are offering their breasts to us
As if we were suckling infants.
What do you think it will taste like?
Like spit on a pair of dice.
Like prison barbed wire.
Like white panties of Veronica Lake.
Like her toes painted red.
Like tallow on death’s wheelbarrow.
At the end of an evil century,
We arouse the devil’s curiosity
By spooning the soup of angels
Into our toothless mouths.
What shall we eat it with?
With an old shoe left in the rain.
With two eyes quarreling in the same head.
With a bent and rusty nail
And a trembling hand.
We’ll sit slurping
With our hats on:
A soup like knives being sharpened.
A thick slaughterhouse soup.
And this is what we’ll have on the side:
The bread of remembrance, a black bread.
Blood sausages of yes and no.
Scallions grown on our mothers’ graves.
Black olives from our fathers’ eyes.
The immigrant in the middle of the Atlantic,
Pissing in the sea with a sense of eternity.
The wine of that clear night,
A dark wine sparkling with stars.