Dear Poem

I offered congratulations from this morning to tomorrow
even though I was corrected regarding the date of birth.
How do I explain that a person
has no idea when
he will end his life this time around?

I write to my mother, my love for her
in the most unexpected moments
of tribute

how will I explain that perhaps it is the penultimate
greeting of a daughter to her mother before the present
cuts
the latter and not the resurrected midwife
from the year ’80
the umbilical cord between me
and her placenta and not to give birth
to me again? But to kill.

I look at my father and cry for another
twenty years or so
that he will not be here
I was ahead of the artist to “grow and sanctify her great name”
in the Kaddish prayer in the twilight hour in Sacker Park.
I shed a tear.

If you live in consciousness as I wrote
“God does not pass over life from man, as he does not
pass over death.”

You are the most miserable person there is, with such insight
you do not enjoy a single piece of bread and no
drink.
You are dead.

A Letter to Tali

There’s a whole world
waiting for you
around the darker
corner of life

in which
you are adept enough to sort clothes
of the same
ethnic group of
the black cloth
of your life.

If you hadn’t been a little better
than the decorations that would add
figurativeness

so as to decorate the rhetoric
of the black cloth of your life

I promise you that you would
get
to see
a star fall in the dark!

Untitled

I planted you, my love, I planted you
And how come what flowered was not what was planted/and the bearing did not yet give birth
What was born

How come what did not wane could be weakened
And on the other hand, the trouble is.

And only into my life they husked this mix
Of how and why, the slips I saved
From your eyes.

Kohenet

You are willing to come
To Jerusalem
Where I kill myself
Every single day –

You can’t live in a place
Where the Transfer is
Conceptually different
For you –

As much as you warned me
About America

Where people don’t realize
The difference between Poetry
And Song,

I want to go back to
Europe – where people live
By caricatures

You say you like Jews

You thought I came from
Those countries – where it is forbidden
To uproot
My Ghetto

So I am going to the hospital
What the hospital asks
Is one less lady
Who smiles.

It’s Almost a Decade Since

She saw you in the Irish pub that night
With your Japanese wife

Wearing westerly clothing
You held her Kimono
The one she hid

While she imposed the “Misogo”
Instead of the Mikve.

Her name the same as the Filipino
Domestic of my dead
Gramma

You know, many Jews died since
You left, more than Gentiles,
But you,
You are my best lesson
It is not forbidden to walk with an
Ilk of “Geishas”-

It was your best deal
To leave me alone, when I
First died in my
Twenties.

To My Father’s Surgeon

I’ve realized how it
works: It is announced that …
and it’s known all of a sudden! *

You know that suddenness has
an action plan that is comprehensive
and detailed – it’s
a strategy within itself.

When it (the suddenness) receives existence in a person’s
ears
it is experienced as a malicious trick indeed it has no
advance warning or alert before taking
action.
Did you know that I had to
dismantle this trick
of suddenness

On the 27th day of January, 2015
on the 10th floor
of hearts in question marks
under full anesthesia
and full monitoring
in waiting
very exact
for waiting for the
cardiology ward.

After all, the obvious suddenness
is no longer
understood
and has many consequences, it is the realization
that we are winning something that we
would not necessarily be entitled
to
when
my father is on the operating table
at a supervised temperature
at which
you bypassed the blockage with an
additional route
in his heart

and I could not
offer you assurances
at this time
my father!

And
I was to the Traveller’s Prayer
and the chorus in the Book of Psalms, from “Blessed is the Man”
and to
the verse
“And all that he does will succeed.”

Did you know
that I have connected to every special quality
for any trouble that may
come
obsessively?

And I was for every letter
of the letters of your name
in Psalms

and I searched for any mention in those hours
of heredity

Did you know that my father has three
daughters of wonderful Semitic beauty
will you recognize my father in them?
When you operated
with this suddenness on father.

And is charity not just a theological term
for gratitude
to be
considered –
please accept this (from me), surgeon!

*Heart bypass surgery, decided on within three days of detection!

Sabbath

When I don’t have cigarettes,
it determines my
Sabbath fate.

Nevertheless,
it all begins with a cigarette on
Sabbath
with an exhale just
before sunset
until the inhalation
the next day when the stars
emerge
with the blessing “That distinguishes between sacred and profane”

This is the most important day
to consume cigarettes, because the day when
God rested
from all his work is not an idea.

That every business is closed
in Jerusalem, even if they made
enough from tobacco
consumption during the week.

Really, there’s a woman for whom the cigarette is
her language
and the way she counts
in cigarette butts
corrects her phobia
with numbers.

I need a cigarette that does not exceed 10 centimeters and is no more than 7 millimeters in diameter
The effect of the nicotine substance found in tobacco on the human brain
inspires in me at the same time
the quality of writing on the Sabbath.

It should be seriously considered

that there are withdrawal
symptoms arising from a lack of
nicotine in the brain that is prevented from me
to contain them
when a person does not consume cigarettes
on the Holy Sabbath.

Accordingly, the biblical saying will come here that
“the Sabbath may be broken when life is at stake”

Should I silence any thirst
and adhere with the Creator blessed without
any adherence to an object
for an entire day?

Generally the week enters on the Sabbath.
For me? On Sunday.

Tali Cohen Shabtai is a poet born in Jerusalem, Israel. She began writing poetry at the age of six, an excellent student of literature. She began her writings by publishing her impressions in the school’s newspaper. Her poetry was published in a prestigious literary magazine of Israel ‘Moznayim’ when she was fifteen years old.

Tali has written three poetry books: Purple Diluted in a Black’s Thick, (bilingual 2007), Protest (bilingual 2012) and Nine Years From You (2018).

Tali’s poems express spiritual and physical exile. She is studying her exile and freedom paradox, her cosmopolitan vision is very obvious in her writings. She lived some years in Oslo, Norway and in the U.S.A. She is very prominent as a poet with a special lyric, “she doesn’t give herself easily, but subjects to her own rules”.

Tali studied at the David Yellin College of Education for a bachelor’s degree. She is a member of the Hebrew Writers’ Association and the Israeli Writers’ Association in the state of Israel.

In 2014, Tali participated in a Norwegian documentary about poets’ lives called “The Last Bohemian”- “Den Siste Bohemien”, which was screened in the cinema in Scandinavia. 

By 2020, her fourth book of poetry will be published, including Norway. Her literary works have been translated into many languages.