Whoever has, even once, glimpsed
the certainty of our freedom
cannot be content with anything
less. He must sit in darkness
with his terrible yearning stuck
in his throat, unable to swallow,
unable to cough it out.
You, more than anyone, told
that most ancient of Jewish stories,
since it was your own. Exile
was the air you breathed, the water
you turned into living blood.
You saw that only one thing
is required of us: endless patience,
since the downward Way of despair
is not yet the way out, and the answer
must wander, bewildered, searching
for a question it will never find.
Sometimes you could feel in your words
an escape from the other voices.
What you heard yourself say, at night,
with nobody listening,
was a comfort—the only comfort:
that in eternity you were
an episode; a mere knot
of resistance to the dark love
that flowed all around you; a palimpsest
with the faint traces
of somebody else’s writing.
Why should you want them saved,
those notes and stories that were just
the same old story? In the light
that was once too strong for your eyes,
you knew that they didn’t matter.
They didn’t matter in the least.