EDWARD HIRSCH
Whose names are erased or trampled to the ground
Continue to visit us.
l· ..
J
71
These poems read so bea utifully that I'm getting the eerie feeling they're
written in English and being translated into Polish! The last poems in
The
Collected Poems
are called "Six Lectures in Verse." I just will read "Lecture VI."
Boundless hi story lasted in that moment
When he was brea king bread and drinking wine.
They were being born , th ey desired, they di ed.
My God, what crowds' How is it possibl e
That all of thcm wanted to live and are no more'
l· . .1
I wrote this next one, called "The Poet at Seven"; it's a sonnet. I have a
strong sense that my identities as an American and a Jew are going in differ–
ent directions: my identity as an American takes me forward, but my identity
as a Jewish person takes me backwards, because Judaism has such a strong
sense of history. There is no Judaism without history, and you might say
there's no American
lIIith
history. I took the title from Rimbaud. But in the
tenor of our proceedings, perhaps, Rimbaud was influenced by Milosz. "The
Poet at Seven."
He could be any seven-year old on th e lawn ,
holding a baseball in hi s hand , ready to throw,
He has th e middl e-class innocence of an America n,
except for hi s blunt features and dark skin
that mark him as a Pal es tinian or a Jew,
his foreh ead furrowed like a question ,
hi s concentrati on camp eyes, nervou s, grim,
and too intense. He has th e typical
blood of th e exil e, th e refu gee, the victim .
Look at him looking at th e catcher for a sign–
so violent and compctitive, so un exceptional ,
except for an ancestral lamentation,
a shadowy, grief-s tricken need for freedom
laboring to express itself through him.
