Zev Davis: Photo credit Judith Fineberg
“The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” — W. H. Auden
The pen has dropped, the papers unrolled,
his formal cadences splintered and old.
Unpolished stanzas, inexact rhyme,
jagged metrics attempt to keep time.
But his guiding hand, his febrile brain,
no longer directs them, aligns the refrain.
How can he compose them, those lines, and steer clear
of further entanglements, rhetoric drear?
The man’s complications, embedded in verse,
cry out for completion and not something worse.
For tinkering poets, whose dreams cannot die,
Zev gave an example of one who would try,
by practicing daily his craft and his art
and offering daily a piece of his heart.
— Written on the 3rd day of Sivan, 5779 / June 6, 2019,
47th Day of the Omer Counting, Hod Sh’b’Malchut
Background:
Zev was a member of the Upper Galilee branch of Voices Israel and regularly made the trip from his home in Nazareth Illit to attend our meetings in Tzfat. He was a formalist poet who sought to adhere to complex traditional structures. This poem appeared in the Voices Israel Newsletter, July 2019, and in that year’s Voices Israel anthology, along with tributes by other poets.
