"Ya'amod bni" ("Let My Son Stand Up") by Yitzhak Laor, Hakibbutz Hamecuhad, 100 page, NIS 68

In his collection of poems "Ke'ayin," from 1999, Yitzhak Laor asks: "Should / I have written different poetry? Should I have / written poetry?" Laor's new book of poetry, his ninth, not only does not ask this question again - the entire collection testifies that poetry is a necessity. There is no memory, there is no life, there is no love, there is no name, there is no body, apart from those that can be verbalized, that is to say - put into words. The words themselves are also default choices, since the aspiration is to the space that is between the word and the memory, life, love.

However, Laor's aspiration to grasp these by means of the word decrees that he must go back and formulate: "And everything gets blurred between the word mother / and the memory." In this sense, the poetic aspiration in this book is opposite to that of the author's earlier poetry. In earlier poems, "Melody," for example ("Only the Body Can Remember," 1985), the speaker's wish is to move with the silence; here the movement is toward the receding world, to the existence/non-existence of memory, the existence/non-existence of life, the existence/non-existence of love. The existence and the non-existence do not balance out, but rather ceaselessly amplify the longing (which is the big theme of this volume), the time that is passing and the missing out on the space between the world and the word.

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In the title poem, "Let My Son Stand Up," which opens the volume, the memory of the dead mother arises. This is not a journey to the past for purposes of nostalgia; memory is one of the raw materials in Laor's poetry, and it cannot be separated from the living moment in the present. The poem about the mother and the speaker's childhood memories, therefore, is also a poem about looking in the present at a world in which it is impossible to distinguish between the personal and the political, the past and the present, everyday language and scriptural language, the language of the child and the language of the adult.

Here is the beginning of the poem: "In July it was hot and the long vacation and my mother washed / green grapes my father harvested from the vine beside / the shed and she sliced a plain loaf and spread the bread / with pure bee honey and under the mulberry tree / she performed plays with the yellow bear for all the neighborhood / children and through her head there passed or not the long / exhausting route from the town where she was born on the Baltic / shore to the small village in Palestinae ..."

The scene that is depicted is not random, but rather its elements are set forth with effort; each detail helps to establish the backdrop of "the known": July, hot, long vacation, the father who harvests green grapes from the vine, the mother who spreads pure honey on slices of bread from a plain loaf and so on. However, the need for which the speaker sets up this backdrop - Laor would not have built it for any merely aesthetic purpose - does not help him, in the end, to decipher the mother's thoughts while she was amusing the neighborhood children (the yellow bear is a reference to Leah Goldberg's poem "The Yellow Bear": "And perhaps it isn't the bear, / For the bear is a good child, / And perhaps it's just my cousin, / Yitzhak is his name. / But of course, of course, / It's little Yitzhak, who is wild"). Her thoughts at this time remain sealed and he can only hypothesize that the trajectory of her life, from the town of her birth to where she now lives, is or is not running through her head. This possibility is present in the thoughts of the adult speaker, who is asking, in both a political and a personal request, to delineate the place where his son will stand: "My son, grandson of my father and mother, will stand up, and in a place / where no Temple will stand / will pray: / Spare us from the brazen and from brazenness / from evil persons / and evil spirits /from bad friends, from bad neighbors and make us not shock troops and jailers, give life / in which there is no shame and disgrace for we / have no good works of our own."

The prayer that the father puts into the mouth of his son is a kind of charm aimed at protecting him, and at the same time it is a decisive political statement. The place that the father commands to his son is a place where nothing is sanctified, apart from humanity. But whereas the mother recites the "Eighteen Benedictions" (in the second stanza of the poem) in a whisper, as is customary, the speaker's prayer in the final stanza is spoken aloud and confidently. This is the voice of poetry speaking out against evil. In the poem "Condition," from the cycle "Rain Upon the Face of Europe," he says, for example: "The end of August, rain upon the / face of Europe, the water will not erase / even the name / Olmert from the newspaper." In these words there is a reference to the story of the Deluge that erased evil from the world, but above all there is a reference here, which is repeated in this cycle, to Yehuda Amichai's poem "Rain in the Battlefield."

Here is another poem from the cycle, which is entitled "Yehuda Amichai": "Rain on the face of Europe, your hip / a scar in my memory. The soldiers want / one more war and that's it, a successful // and short one, for dessert and to fly to Europe. / Amichai would have pitied them too (we / shall make do with the kindergarten children)."

Alongside the homage to Amichai there is also criticism of him for having directed his pity at everyone indiscriminately. For Laor, the distinction between those who are deserving of pity and those who are not must be made. In the cycle's first poem, "Ostensibly the Present," he says: "End of August, rain / upon the face of Europe, we cover our heads with a newspaper, embrace." If in the Amichai poem referred to, the difference between his living companions and his dead companions is that the living can cover their heads with a blanket against the rain whereas the dead cannot, for Laor it is the action by the living that is crucial, though it too is restricted to a large extent, bound as it is by the limitation of words: The words of the newspaper are erased in the rain and in their stead words are written that condemn evil directly: "Then General Adam sang the lullaby: 'We shall not count the dead now, la la la.' (Pray for the peace of generals and how much do they get / there per month and how much for their pension and what suit will they choose for the next / war?) No, no, no, it is not good that the man should be an Arab, but / you are a Jew, my only son, if they kidnap you, our prime minister / will slumber and sleep, but in fire, in blood and in pillars of smoke he will free / you, your corpse, now sleep."

It is possible, of course, to attack these things in exactly the formula that Laor uses to criticize Amichai; the required distinction between one war and another is not produced here, and things, of course, are more complicated than they look and so on. But to use a formulation of Bertolt Brecht's, Laor is not interested in asking, under the murderer's axe, whether he too is a human being, but rather in saying what the poet has to say uncompromisingly and in a timely way (the poem was published in the literary section of Haaretz on July 28, 2006, in the midst of the war in Lebanon). And even if in another poem he regrets that this was all he could do: "I wrote poems, I gave the murderers democratic / satisfaction."

While the words against evil are determined and confident, the love in this volume is ceaselessly seeking words and a body: "Orpheus is trying again. He believes / in the bone that their love will materialize / so it will not remain between a wordless body / and the body of words..." The book to which Laor refers again and again is Song of Songs. It is no accident that the references to Song of Songs are common to both the mother and love, for in the place where love is, even before psychoanalytic interpretations of one sort or another, the gaze, the voice and the body exist: The speaker's expectation is that his mother will stand up for the recitation of the "Eighteen Benedictions" so that he can look up at her from below in the intimacy that knows how to "read" her even from a distance.

The voice of the mother reading to him at bedtime, in wonder, Miriam Yalan-Shteklis' poem "My Friend Tintin," joins him on behalf of a world of the imagination. His acute desire to replicate her voice is unsuccessful: "And my deplorably roaring desire / I want to fish my mother's voice carefully out of myself, how very much I want to hear her reading me that poem, no one has ever seen it / yet, no one has heard it / and like replicating my mother's voice / I will never be able to do it aloud ..." The figure of the speaker is reflected in his beloved's gaze: "Forever the memory of my disgrace will be / engraved in your gaze, how easy it was to anoint me / with love, and indeed you were mine, and your dark beauty / and your tired, wise smile / gleamed in the darkness / like a magic lantern"; and the gaze that melds with the body: "Yes, even if you want me / to bite your nape and grasp your hips / I will not restrain myself from seeing your eyes in that male / moment that clings forever."