Poem: Birdsong

I keep the TV on even if I go into another room
or outside to the garden. I listen knowing
what I hear and see or do not hear or see
are the stories of mothers and sons,
fathers, daughters, wives. Words too adrift
and unearthly for the living to turn off.
Speeches, parrots screeching overhead,
dipping and swaying as the children’s choir
and the young dancers perform. Heavenly faces.
The guards of the house become shaky.
Men of valor are bent. Doors to the street
are shut, all the strains of music die down.
But what of the young, Koheleth, who die young?
What of the young who bury them?
Does the early death accelerate their aging?
Or does it keep the birdsong from growing
feeble? Are they unafraid of what is above—
a black hole with its stellar clusters
or a sinkhole along the salty desert
where none of the forces that bring down
our flesh or wear away our soft bone are alive?
It is dark in there it is time standing still
it is the edge against the edge without space to
breathe without change or rupture again.

Poetry Editor Alicia Ostriker comments: Linda Stern Zisquit’s Jerusalem-based “Birdsong” takes place in the painful present, where life with the TV half-listened-to alternates entertainment and the not-quite heard “stories” of war. The beautiful words of Ecclesiastes (“Kohelet” in Hebrew), evoking the inevitability of aging and the approach of death, force the speaker to think of the young who are dying and the young who are burying them. What remains unsaid in the poem is everything the reader will know, will feel—the horror, the grief, the bitterness of war.