Click for Poetry Weekend מבחר מסופ"ש שירה |
Her topic this time is חזית חמה, which begs to be translated simply as "warm front", but which any Israeli will tell you instantly calls forth a very different kind of "front", which unfortunately is often burning hot with tragic destruction. And it is not always just the front that is hot. Let's not forget. It is the majority who remain at the rear, on the home front, who contend with many minute-to-minute tensions, running for cover, worrying about the next news flash and more than I will tell here about the apparently never-ending "situation" there (although the poem is not too reticent about telling some -- perhaps I'll translate it to English down the line).
So..., here is Nilly Dagan's handsome web display of five poems on the topic (click on the image above), along with her own poetic transitions between the five poems, and just below the web image, a link to a PDF from one of my favorite, veteran Israeli literary journals -- Iton 77 -- where this same collection including my poem appears in print.
What's it all about (my Hebrew poem), you ask........? Why has this poem gotten so much play over the past ten-plus years? Is it "a day in the life"? from news flash to news flash? Something of what we see and hear on our way to finding ourselves again surprisingly "alive and well" this time while others are not? Maybe also something slightly more? About the where and who? Something else?
For the Poetry Weekend webpage, click on the image up at the top.