Will Truly Yet Come...

LEAH GOLDBERG

DIALOGUE

He

In your silence, there sank like into deep sea

My bitter word. My love listens attentively-

From echoless distances there wafts to me

The peace of your flesh without kindness and mercy.

Your body to me was exile and foreignness.

From your glance, as from a pool I see

My image acting on myself most cruelly,

My dark soul-from your transparentness.

My beggared state-from out of abundance and loveliness.

For me you are the road to double loneliness.

She

Light broke through. It struck the pupils of my eyes,

In its brightness extinguishing all other images.

You have made me a wasteland, a blind wilderness.

Before me, you have made the fortressed. wall arise.

Here I am imprisoned, and cut off within myself,

Scorched by loneliness, towards a strange world's lands

I carry my dust in my own hands.

In my own death, happy would I be.

But woe, woe to us both if I survive

And out of this dust I rise new born

Opening my eyes to see twicefold,

And this time nothing else were left alive

Save the memory of my foreign form

And the taste on my lips of bitter mold.