Collected Poems by Alan; Sillitoe

salt
    Feasts on oranges and people,
    Envying their safety;
    And their rock through which
    Six million nails were hammered
    As deep as the world’s middle,
    And the sky that no floodtide can reach.

LEARNING HEBREW
    With coloured pens and pencils
    And a child’s alphabet book
    I laboriously draw
    Each Hebrew letter
    Right to left
    And hook to foot,
    Lamed narrow at the top,
    The steel pen deftly thickening
    As it descends
    And turns three bends
    Into a black cascade of hair,
    Halting at the vowel-stone
    To one more letter.
    Script comes up like music
    Blessing life
    The first blue of the sea
    The season’s ripe fruit
    And the act of eating bread:
    Each sign hewn out of rock
    By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.
    I’m slow to learn
    Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads
    Arks and ships in black, pure black
    The black of the enormous sky
    From behind a wall of rock:
    With their surety of law
    Such shapes make me illiterate
    And pain the heart
    As if a boulder bigger than the earth
    Would crush me:
    Struck blind I go on drawing
    To enlighten darkness.
    Such help I need:
    Lost in this slow writing,
    Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick
    Go into the cavern-mouth
    And sleep by phosphorescent letters
    Dreaming between aleph or tav
    Beginning and end
    Or the lit-up middle.
    Dreams thin away:
    In day the hand writes
    Hebrew letters cut in my rock
    Painted by a child on the page,
    For they are me and I am them
    But can’t know which.

SYNAGOGUE IN PRAGUE
    Killers said
    Before they used their slide-rules
    â€˜Death is the way to Freedom’:
    Seventy-seven thousand names
    Carved on these great walls
    Are a gaol Death cannot open.
    Eyes close in awe and sorrow
    As if that name was my mother
    That boy starved to death my son
    Those men gassed my brothers
    Or striving cousins.
    It might have been me and if it was
    I spend a day searching the words
    For my name.
    I’d be glad it was not me
    If the dead could see sky again,
    Reach that far-off river and swim in it.
    What can one say
    When shouting rots the brain?
    The dead god hanging in churches
    Was not allowed to hear
    Of work calling for revenge
    To ease the pain of having let it happen
    And stop it being planned again.
    Letters calling for revenge on such a wall
    Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,
    And seventy-seven thousand
    Stonily indented names
    Would still show through.
    Vengeance is Jehovah’s own;
    To prove He’s not abandoned us
    He gave the gift of memory,
    The fruit of all trees
    In the Land of Israel.

ISRAEL
    Israel is light and mountains
    Bedrock and river
    Sand-dunes and gardens,
    Earth so enriched
    It can be seen from
    The middle of the sun.
    Without Israel
    Would be
    The pain
    Of God struck from the universe
    And the soul falling
    Endlessly through night.
    Israel
    Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world
    A storm-light marking
    Job’s Inn – open to all –
    An ark without lifeboats
    On land’s vast ocean.

ON AN OLD FRIEND REACHING JERUSALEM
    No one may ask what I am doing here:
    Olive-leaves one side glisten tin
    The other is opaque like my dulled hair.
    I travelled far. I walked. I ate
    The train’s black smoke,
    Choked on Europe’s bitter sin.
    When forests grew from falling ash
    I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet
    And sucked them back to life for bread.
    Christian roofs were painted red
    And four horizons closed their doors.
    Pulled apart by Europe’s sky
    My soul is polished by Jerusalem
    Where I fall fearlessly in love
    Ashen by the Western Wall,
    And through my tears no one dare ask
    What I am doing here.

FESTIVAL
    The moon came up over Jerusalem
    Blood-red
    An hour later it was white
    Bled to death.
    The breath of memory revives
    On the Fifteenth Day of Ab.
    The spirit and the flesh
    Don’t clash when men and women
    Walk in orange groves
    To reinvigorate the moon.
    God knew the left hand
    And the right
    When Lot chose
    The Plain of Ha-Yarden
    And Abram – Canaan.
    An