Years I walked at your side
like our prophet Isaiah
barefoot naked and bare
I will put on no cover
until you see me
until you recognize an other
one person
at least
and so know yourself as well
Mordechai Geldman came of age as a poet in the seventies, an auspicious and transformative time in the development of modern Hebrew literature, as poets and writers rejected the flowery, the hyperbolic, and the sentimental and opted instead for a more direct and intimate speech. While his early poems tended to rely on linguistic exploration, his vision soon turned inward, as he came to favor the simple, the true, the authentic. Geldman’s poems are direct and accessible, touching on and revealing the divine and the sacred in the so-called mundane.
Poetry
Years I Walked at Your Side: Selected Poems
December 18, 2018
Discussion Questions
Mordechai Geldman’s poems are revelatory, a self-investigation in which everything is interconnected: his childhood, his sexual identity, Judaism, Zen Buddhism, psychoanalysis, beauty, physical desire, and poetry. In this soaring compendium of wonderfully translated poems, Geldman, now in his seventies, considers the calculus of his life. In “I Don’t Know” he writes:
I don’t know/what I will be singing at the end
and if I will be singing at the end/I don’t know
what I will be missing at the end
and elsewhere he writes:
but better than a poem is a blind cat
who survives in the streets among odors and sounds
and endows me with seven souls
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