Murder and Words

Two Poems by Aaron Zeitlin

I promised last week that I would share a happier poem today. And I was working on a lovely, fascinating long poem by H Leivick, his complicated paean to American democracy, which cites “the hymns of Whitman” as its ancestor.

And then this became another hellish week of American slaughter. Suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about Leivick’s ambivalent ideals of “American freedom / sanctified… through Lincoln’s sacrificial blood.”

This wasn’t an intellectual decision. I just couldn’t send those words out, couldn’t find a single thing to say about them. Leivick’s post-Holocaust ideas of democracy in the USA collapsed, while I was translating them, in the face of our American dystopia.

Maybe I’ll still share that poem in the future. But this week I turned, in response to the massacre in Uvalde, back to Aaron Zeitlin. I thought about working on poems of comfort, but that would’ve been dishonest. I needed something that could hold the grief and fury of these headlines.

Below are two short poems which Zeitlin wrote in response to the murder of his family. Here he is, in the last decade of his life:

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Murder and Words

From day to day it lessens, 
my ability to tolerate
the words I say,
the words that others say.

The world overflows with words.
The world overflows with murder.
No place exists
where one can flee
from murder and from words.

If a Comfort Does Exist

The one and only comfort, if a comfort does exist,
is in denying death: you all exist.
In other worlds you wear new clothes.
And here on earth, 
or so I dream, you become children
re-enlivened with earthly desires,
and from among you will emerge, when it is time,
that redeemer, that liberator, that renewer of the covenant
who will endow humanity with a bright, pure form.
I dream this in a generation when belief
fades from believers. But even now,
your child is still desperate to believe in you,
God of miracles and of anguish!

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Murder, words. Merder, verter, in Yiddish; the almost-rhyme points Zeitlin towards a deeper alignment between language and violence. We talk and talk and talk, we write and write, but for what end? “The world overflows with murder.”

(I suspect that Zeitlin is also making a deeper mystical claim here about the linguistic structure of reality, though that’s beyond the scope of this newsletter.)

I’m so moved by the opening of the second poem. “If a comfort does exist”; as Zeitlin writes in an entirely different poem, “my heart cannot forget that if.” He is not certain that consolation is possible, but neither is he certain that it is not. His God is a God of miracles and of anguish at once, and he lives—like all of us—within the contradictions of a wonder that does not nullify suffering, and a suffering that does not nullify wonder.

These are certainly Holocaust poems, but it would be reductive to read them as only about the Holocaust. They are poems for a world in which children are murdered, a world in which words are at once meaningless and powerful. And somehow, both miraculously and despairingly, we cannot stop writing and speaking.

In his most famous poem, “Six Lines,” Zeitlin describes himself as “a word beggar in the Jewish graveyard.” Today I’m thinking of us all as beggars in this American graveyard, desperate for anything to make such violence less likely to recur.