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Yakov Azriel

Yakov Azriel was born in New York in 1950, and has lived in Israel since 1971. He has published three full-length books of poetry in the USA: Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis (2005), In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus (2008) and Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus (2009), all published by Time Being Books (www.timebeing.com). Eventually, three more books of poetry relating to books of the Bible will be published in this series (on Numbers, Deuteronomy and Psalms, respectively).  Over 120 of his poems have been published in journals in the USA, the UK and Israel, and his poems have won twelve awards in international poetry competitions, as well as two fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.



Smoke

“The column of cloud by day, and the column of fire by night, did not depart from before the people.” (Exodus 13:22)

                                                                                   Warsaw, August 1942

At the Umschlagplatz, the train to Treblinka,
Ready to transport the Jews of Warsaw
To where people are transported through chimneys
As smoke,
Waits.

Smoke from the locomotive,
Gray, thick, in an amorphous column
Rises, then drifts, then disperses and dissipates in the summer air;
Like Polish Jews;
Like hope.

Our fathers taught us
The Jews were led in the desert to the promised land
By a column of cloud by day,
And a column of fire by night,
Hiding the God of Israel’s glory.

But in the desert of Poland, the Jews are led to their final solution
For the greater glory of the Third Reich
Packed in cattle cars on a train
(Or is it a mobile cemetery with iron wheels
For filaments of smoke who do not yet know they are smoke?)

The passive locomotive impassively emits a column of smoke
As prosaic as despair,
As transient
As hope
Embodied in a work-certificate ignited by a match.

If only our fathers had learned
From columns of cloud and fire in the desert
How to reveal the hidden glory,
How to retrieve and reverse and revive
Wisps of smoke.

"Smoke" is from In the Shadow of a Burning Bush: Poems on Exodus, by Yakov Azriel. Copyright © 2008 by Time Being Books.

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