Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I have been curating the series with help and contributions this year from Kashiana Singh and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Technically, National Poetry Month is over, but we didn’t quite get to thirty, so I thought I would squeeze a few more in.

Today’s poem is by Yonatan Berg, an Israeli poet I was not familiar with until I ran across an article in Lunch Ticket (https://lunchticket.org/two-poems/ - the second poem on the page) with two of his poems translated from Hebrew to English by Joanna Chen. If you go to the page, I ask you to read the translator’s notes at the bottom. They are brief, and very good. I included this poem purposely after yesterday’s, You Are Your Own State Department, by Naomi Shihab Nye, and while their families hail from different sides of the tracks, so to speak, in the Israeli / Palestinian situation, their views have very much in common.

This is an important thing for Americans in particular to understand, in an era when opportunists are still pitting one half of the country against the other, creating and inflaming tensions, instead of pushing for Unity, which is the title of today’s poem. Nye, with the perspective of a longer life, talks of incremental change - small acts of kindness for those who suffer. Berg is not as concrete, in fact he is entirely mystical. Unlike Nye, he does not offer up any way to change the reality we are in physically. Instead he describes us as common souls, sharing a journey through darkness. And the recognition of that shared experience is his call for unity.

I think that Joanna Chen’s translation is excellent. As a separate point, I would like to say that yesterday’s poem reminds me of my good friend Hani Silwani, originally from Jerusalem. Today’s reminds me of another good friend, one who has lived through many dark journeys, Yair Alon from Holon, Israel, whose ambulance-driving was, in part, inspiration for one of my own stories, Tethered to the Sky.

Berg begins with:

We travel the silk road of evening,

tobacco and desire flickering

between our hands. We are warm travelers,

our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms,

in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee.

I would like you to note the phrase “our eyes unfurled,” suggesting they open, uncovered and uncloaked, to see and experience everything. There are religious and cultural references of all types, open and agnostic, following the metaphor of the open eyes. Later in the poem:

(The full text of the article is available at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.)