Thoughts from The Frontier: The Chastisement of God, by Chaim N. Bialik (Jewish Frontier, May, 1942)

A poem, by Chaim N. Bialik, translated by Abraham Moses Klein, famous Canadian-Jewish poet and writer from Montreal.

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THE CHASTISEMENT OF GOD

Translated from the Hebrew by Abraham M. Klein

          The chastisement of God is this His curse:
That you shall your own very hearts deny
To cast your hallowed years on foreign waters, –
Your tears on luminous false threads to thread,
To breathe, your breath in marble alien,
And in the heathen, stone to sink your soul.

          The teeth of the gluttons of your flesh drip blood –
But you shall feed them also your own souls;
And Pithom and Rameses for those that hate you
Shall you erect, your children used as brick.
Yea, and their cry, from wood and stone arising,
Within the portal of your ear shall die.

          If one of these shall grow an eagle’s wings
For ever from his eerie shall you fling him,
And should he, mighty, thirsting the sun, soar upwards –
No, not for you shall sunlight be revealed,
And not on you effulgence glow when his
Pinions divide the clouds, a path for sun!
For high upon crags, shall he lift up his scream;
The echo thereof shall not your ears attain.

          So shall you, one by one, the noblest spurn
And so shall you at least remain bereaved.
Your tent has laid waste, and glory fled from your hearth,
Calamity and terror shall be yours.
The foot of God shall spurn your threshold, and
Joy shall not tap your windowpane.
Seek you your ruins for prayer – you cannot pray;
Summon consolatory tears – in vain;
Withered shall be your hearth, a cluster of grapes,
Shrunken, flung in a corner of the [vine]
Wherefrom the hearth-rejoicing sap shall never rise
Nor ever shall restore the soul that [pities].

          Yea, you shall stir the hearth to find cold stones
Where in the chilled ashes mews the [cat].
In grief and sorrow shall you sit.  Without,
The melancholy world; within you, dust.
Dead flies in your windows you shall then behold,
And in the desolate cracks, the spider’s web;
And you shall hear the shaking of the wall,
And in the chimney, wailing Penury.

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