“This was the Black Swan, the Prince of Thebes, Jussuf, Tino of Baghdad.” So wrote German poet Gottfried Benn about his ex-lover Else Lasker-Schuler, the erratic, impoverished, fantastical German-Jewish poet. Lasker-Schuler, one of interwar Berlin’s most prominent poets, fled Germany in 1933 after being beaten by Nazi thugs with an iron rod. She was sixty-four. She fled to Switzerland and, eventually, Israel. She looked, in the memorable words of Jerusalem friend Heinz Politzer, “…like a solitary, exotic nightbird, with enormous eyes in an ageless face. The whole of her seemed as if carved from a mandrake root.” At her funeral on the Mount of Olives, her poem “I Know” was recited in German, unheard of in the Jerusalem of 1945.
O God
Everywhere only brief sleep
in man, in green leaves, in the chalice of the wind.
Each turns homeward into his dead heart.
Would that the world were still a child–
and could tell me of its very first breath.
Long ago there was a great goodness in heaven,
the stars gave each other the Bible to read.
If only once I could grasp God’s hand,
or see the moon perched on his finger.
O God, O God, how far I am from thee!
Translation and biographical notes taken from the volume Else Lasker-Schuler, Selected Poems, Green Integer 2002.
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