A Summer-Sonata

I swam alone in fresh, clear waters,
And through a light-green stream, saw my white, white feet.
Barefoot, I walked home in lush woods
That breathed hard and circled me sweetly.

I came out onto a vast field,
Where the wind lustfully licked my feet,
The grass kissed them, and even a fat fly bit me
With passionate delicacy.

I got home full of love and ecstasy;
I was breathing heat, my heart beating wildly,
And everything was wonderful in my eyes,
As if I was meant to be very lucky.

And when the evening fell hot and still,
Something sharp sucked, feeding on my heart,
As if someone were going to kiss me at night,
As if serpents were going to suckle.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

October, 2009

Poems

Yerra Sugarman translates Celia Dropkin

Celia Dropkin was born in 1888 in what is today the independent country of Belarus. She studied and taught in Warsaw and Kiev, then, after her husband was forced to flee from the tsarist police, immigrated to the United States in 1912. She wrote in Russian until about 1917, when she began to work in her other mother tongue, Yiddish, becoming one of the important immigrant poets who transformed it into a modern poetic language. She wrote some short stories and painted, but she is primarily known as a poet and innovator of erotic modernist love poetry in Yiddish, publishing much of her poetry in American Yiddish literary magazines. A volume of her poems, In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), was published in 1935, and, under the same title, expanded by her children into a book of her collected work in 1959. Dropkin died in 1956.

Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone, published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January 2008, also by Sheep Meadow. She is also the recipient of a "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and, most recently, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers. Her poems, translations and articles have appeared widely. She currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.