Summer Poetry From Ronny Someck
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Last year, as the scorching summer set in, we offered our readers unexpected relief from the heat. Admittedly, it was more of an aesthetic, even darkly comic relief, rather than a physical one. It was Israeli poet Ronny Someck’s piece, “Sun Sonnet.”
This year we’re featuring another summer poem of Someck’s, “Rainmakers’ Vacation,” which, like “Sun Sonnet,” was translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden and first appeared in Haaretz.
Someck’s summer, as presented in this poem, is distinctly Mediterranean. Though surprise thunderstorms make appearances on our side of the ocean, they’re entirely out of the picture before the High Holy Days for Israelis, as they are for the poem’s young Italian woman sweating at a nameless café on a Trieste piazza. Yet, curiously, while the “Rainmaker” is on vacation, a dry spell does not truly reign, as images of moisture creep into the poem’s last few lines. The Italian girl’s lips are “wet,” and poem’s final word is “waves.” It is as if the Rainmaker is still there somehow, in the subconscious rather than out in the open. Here’s to sublimated rains and summer vacations!
Rainmakers’ Vacation
Drops
in rain language
have not yet begun to stutter
in the cloud throat.
The thunder mouth is toothless
and lighting has not yet flicked
the spotlights on in the pupil
of the eye.
Until the stoves are lit,
sleeves will be rolled up on the arms of the sun,
another demonstration will erupt
in the clandestine curves of the girl
who in a Trieste piazza has wet
her lips with wine
and the summer will send gangsters
to repulse autumn’s gunmen
from the border of its waves.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
