JAMES E. YOUNG
You are people who are superfluous
You are nothing but a handful of lice
Stinging and itching
To madness .
601
Speaking on behalf of all Israelis in this ironic inversion, the poet
would thus avenge the Jews' past suffering by condemning their
present enemy-refugees to suffer
as
Jews .
Finally , in "One Cannot Kill a Baby Twice," Ravikovitch
overlays imagery drawn almost directly from Bialik with language
infused by the Holocaust; and again, children provide both the
essential locus of horror and motivation for the poem:
Upon sewage puddles in Sabra and Shatilla
There you transferred masses of people
Great masses
From the world of the living to the world of the dead.
Night after night.
First they shot
After that they hung
Finally they slaughtered with knives .
Terrified women appeared in haste
Above a dust hillock:
"There they slaughter us,
In Shatilla."
A delicate tail of a new moon was hung
Above the camps.
Our soldiers illuminated the place with flares
Like daylight.
"Return to the camp, march!" the soldier commanded
The screaming women from Sabra and Shatilla.
He had orders to follow .
And the children were already laid in filthy puddles
Their mouths wide open
Calm.
Nobody will hurt them anymore.
One cannot kill a baby twice . .. .
The soldiers are only "following orders," and it happens if not in
broad daylight, then beneath the light of the soldiers' own flares .
One cannot kill a baby twice, it turns out, except in memory and its
resonance in contemporary experiences; in this way, the children in
