PIJ.ORG: "Observation of a Bee" A poem By Leah Goldberg

Leah Goldberg
Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) was one of the most significant Israeli poets of the twentieth century, and the first woman to be admitted into the canon of modern Hebrew poetry. Born in Königsberg, raised in Kaunas, Lithuania, she learned Hebrew at the Hebrew gymnasium of the city. She completed a PhD degree at the University of Bonn with a dissertation on the Samaritan translation of the Hebrew Bible and arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1935. She belonged to the leading group of modernist poets that flocked in Tel-Aviv in the 1930s and 1940s and worked as a drama and literature critic for socialist newspapers. In 1952 she was invited to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to teach comparative literature. Goldberg published poetry, prose, drama, essays, translations from several European languages and children’s literature, and has also been translated into many languages. This biography is based on The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, Edited by S. Kaufman, G. Hasan-Rokem, and T. S. Hess, The Feminist Press 1999, p. 246.

In the square of a lighted window ¬
On the pane, from outside,
The silhouette of a bee.
One can hardly see her wings.

Upside-down.
Narrow body.
Six thin legs.
With a naked exposure,
With an ugly threat,
Crawls
The bee.

How shall we crown her with the words of a poem?
How shall we sign, and what?
A little boy will come and say:
The queen is naked.

In the sun she was a falling leaf,
In the flower a speck of dark honey,
A dew-drop in a swarm of stars ¬
And here she is a shadow.

One word of a poem in the ringing swarm,
A fierce will in the languid garden,
A burst of light in the sunset's ash-
And here she is a shadow.

Your honey? Who'll remember your honey? It's there.
Far away. In the hive.
Here on the lighted windowpane, your body, your head ¬
You're all sting: helpless blind miserable hatred.

Fear kills.

Watch out.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell; taken from Ariel, November 32, 1973.