Gather Me In

Gather me in from all the ends of time,

from wood and stone,

Embrace me like letters of a burning prayerbook.

Gather me together--so I can be alone,

Alone with you, and you--in all my limbs.

Find me in a grave between the other world and here,

While weighing which of the worlds is better . . .

Find me as you avenge half a tear,

And when you see me cooling a hot knife in snow.

Remember, the cloud is sown through with my bones

And rains down with my lightning face.

Gather me together--so I can be alone,

Alone with you, and you--in all my limbs.

From “A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose,” translated from the Yiddish by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav (University of California Press: $35; 432 pp.). Abraham Sutzkever’s poetic muse was born out of the most desperate circumstances. He remembers that when he was hiding in the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania under German occupation, it was writing that helped him to survive: “It is a spirit that enters you and it is stronger than all the bullets.” Sutzkever edits Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), a Yiddish literary quarterly he founded in Tel Aviv in 1948. 1991 by the Regents of the University of California.