Anna Margolin

Today I give you a poem that, with the help of wikipedia, I just discovered myself. I was looking for a new poem by a poet I'd never read before. Anna Margolin, nee Rona Harning Levensbaum was born in Belarus in 1887, and moved to America when she was 26. She wrote in Yiddish, so this is a translation of the original, but the power of her words is felt nonetheless.

With Half-Shut Eyes

by Anna Margolin

Seated at a table in the gray hall,
Idle and anxious, wrapping myself in my shawl,
I don't look at you, do I?
I don't call you to me, do I?
But my mouth is redder now,
And my half-shut eyes
Are smoky.

But I am flooded with sound and light,
And I see your face through fog and flame,
And on my lips the taste
Of sun and wind is sharp.

But I pull myself up with a choked cry,
I grow trembling, feverish,
And this growing hurts.

Removed to a corner of the gray hall,
In the long flaming folds of my shawl,
I don't look at you, do I?
I don't call you to me, do I?
But a little painfully and deeply and blindly,
With half-shut eyes
I have taken you into myself.