Maya Bejerano
trans. by Tsipi Keller
Seascape
And the sea will be calm and possibly wavy
– – – – –
such forecast, at my age, is no longer welcome.
I imagine that my foot,
like Icarus’s, will rise from the water
and shine its whiteness upon it.
Bruegel Bruegel—a question:
Did you take pains to paint the body
of Daedalus’s son submerged in the depths
of the blue water—we will never know.
And the sea around us sprayed a blue
calm and possibly wavy,
sailboats were noted as markers
and a kingfisher hopped among the rocks.
From the pier we watched
Jaffa borne aloft upon the water,
its white homes closely packed like fish scales,
about to sail away at any moment.
And the masts of boats at the dock
sway, cables rattle,
a few people swim, splash,
and the sound of sirens is rising and falling, rising and falling,
and the sea is calm and possibly wavy.
photo by Bar Gordon
Maya Bejerano is one of Israel’s leading poets and has published fourteen poetry collections and been translated into a dozen languages. Her volume The Hymns of Job and Other Poems, a Lannan Translation Selection, was published by BOA Editions in 2008, and her poems appear in Poets on the Edge—An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY, 2008). Among her awards are the Prime Minister Award (1986; 1994), the Bernstein Award (1988), the Bialik Award (2002) and the Yehuda Amichai Award (2016). She lives and works in Tel Aviv.
photo by Roberta Allen
Tsipi Keller is a novelist, translator, and the author of eleven books. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including NEA Translation Fellowships, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award from Columbia University. Her most recent translation, Futureman, a volume of selected poems by the late David Avidan, was published by Phoneme Media in 2017.