Gracious Angel

Gracious angel, clad in white and violet,
How do you tear the heart out of a poet?
Do you cut it with a knife? Stab it with a pen?
Can you take a poet’s heart and kill it there and then?

–I do not cut it with a knife. I don’t stab it with a pen.
I cannot take a poet’s heart and kill it there and then.
I only end the dream that has winged its final flight
And cold becomes the heart like the fields at night.

Gracious angel, clad in white and violet,
What do you do with the famous poet
After you take the pen from his hands
Because his dream has no more strands…

And the mourners and the knowers their sorrowing intone
And the tears still fall like feathers on a stone.
Do you grapple with the coffin? Cover it with loam?
Is his fate the same that must to all others come?

–Oh I do not touch the coffin. I don’t cover it with loam.
His fate is not the same that must to others come.
I only take his soul across a wind-bridge in the air,
So each generation can bring him back alive from there.

In memory of the Poet, Moishe Laib Halperin
1886-1932