Online Read Free Novel
  • Home
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    Home


    Prev Next

    

      Home

      Uvi Poznansky

      Zeev Kachel

      Home ©2012

      Uvi Poznansky, Zeev Kachel

      All rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,

      including information storage and retrieval system,

      without the written permission of the publisher,

      except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Published by Uviart

      P.O. Box 3233 Santa Monica CA 90408

      Blog: uviart.blogspot.com Website: uviart.com

      Email: uvi@uviart.com

      First Edition 2012

      Printed in the United States of America

      Book design, cover design, cover image and illustrations by

      Uvi Poznansky

      Library of Congress Control Number:  2012915617

      ISBN: 978-09849932-3-9

      ASIN: B00960TE3Y

      Contents

      Uvi Poznansky

      Home

      This is the Place

      Muse

      A Sentence, Unfinished

      His First Home

      A Child on a Wagon

      A Heartbeat, Reversed

      And Then She Left Him

      Blade

      Even One Mark

      Don’t Open Your Eyes

      This Tissue Is Me

      Be Still, A Poet’s Heart

      A Diamond Short, A Decade Late

      Zeev Kachel

      Reparations

      We Were Born in Darkness

      After You’ve Gone

      Childhood Years

      My Teachers

      Fall

      Memory

      Every Day I Tear A Leaf

      She and I

      Lie to Me

      I Forgive you Everything

      Don’t be a Judge

      Weep, My Heart

      Not to Think

      I’m Not Sorry

      Not One is Home

      Your Advocate, Your Voice

      My Girl of Innocence, from Time to Time

      My Ties Unhitched

      We Met Here

      Somewhere There

      In My Dream I Hear

      Another Time

      Never have the Days

      We Pass

      Glass Eyes

      Not in Good Spirits

      Crossroad

      No Need to Worry Anymore

      A Different Man

      Everything has Long Lost its Weight

      Should I Fall

      Now I Cry

      When Life Becomes a Curse

      Without a Compass

      The Wolf

      The Easiest Demise

      Bent Over Memories

      I Plucked a Wildflower

      The Heart of Space

      I Live Here on Paint and on Toxoid

      The Time is Near

      Fall

      Autumn’s Gold

      On My Body

      Tired of Fighting

      It All Passes

      Maybe

      Perhaps

      Maybe

      Vigil Light

      A Memorial

      A Lone Wolf

      Time Crawls Slowly

      Fantasy

      Blessed

      In a Dark Night with not a Friend

      I Am

      About the Cover & Illustrasions

      About This Book

      About Zeev Kachel

      About Uvi Poznansky

      A Note to the Reader

      Bonus Excerpt: A Peek at Bathsheba

      Bonus Excerpt: A Favorite Son

      Bonus Excerpt: Apart From Love

      Books by Uviart

      Apart From Love

      The David Chronicles

      Rise to Power

      A Peek at Bathsheba

      The Edge of Revolt

      A Favorite Son

      Twisted

      Home

      Jess and Wiggle

      Now I Am Paper

      Uvi Poznansky

      Poems and Prose

     

      Home

      Uvi Poznansky, 20121

      Sucked in by a force, I'm flying through a tunnel

      The tunnel of memory that leads me back home

      The past blurs my present, so my vision is double

      The walls and the ceiling curve into a dome

      From here I can see my home, tilting

      And falling from place, all the lamps are aflame

      My father's empty chair is slowly ascending

      Tipped by the light, outlining its frame

     

      This is the Place

      Uvi Poznansky, 2012

      This is the place where he put pen to paper...

      But clung to the wall, the shelves are now bare

      All that remains of his words is but vapor

      All you can spot is but a dent in his chair  

      He used to sit here, here he would stare

      Years come, years go, an old clock keeping score,

      He would scribble his notes, crumple them in despair

      Waiting for his savior—but locking that door

      That door sealed him off, away from all danger

      Except from the depth of the danger within

      No one could intrude here, except for the stranger

      Who would carry him off to where his end would begin—

      The poet, who’d mourned the loss of his mother

      Would then, somehow, be reduced to a child

      He would crouch at the threshold, and call, call, call, call her

      Knock, knock, knock at the door; no more held back, but wild

      This is the place where he put pen to paper

      Till the door opened, creaking on a hinge...

      Locked in embrace, perhaps at last he can feel her

      No need to cry now, can't feel that twinge

     

      Muse

      Uvi Poznansky, 2012

      The lamp swings like a pendulum

      Pictures sway on their nails

      Then slip down the walls, leaving scratched trails

      Amidst the quake, the grief, the confusion and scare

      Slowly ascending is my father's armchair

      And beyond all these outlines of what I see there

      Beyond the sofa, the knickknacks, the old furniture

      Light pours in, and it paints something new

      It reveals, it unveils at this moment a clue

      The clue to a presence only he could once see

      A presence he longed for, because only she

      Could call him back home, and envelop him so

      Touching-not-touching, her hands all aglow

      These pages, upon which he'll never scribble a line

      Are floating out of shadows, into the shine

      Only she can now read the blanks, she and no other

      He's ascending into the arms of his muse, his mother.

      A Sentence, Unfinished

      Uvi Poznansky, 2004

      At this moment, a man is lying in his armchair, propped up on a large pillow. He has lived, or rather, has confined himself within these walls for decades, for a reason unknown. In this stagnant place all sounds are muffled, all images erased—but for one thing: his youth. There is a vibrant longing in him for the adventures of his early days. 

      Was it not just yesterday when he left his home in Poland, never to see his parents again?  Has he not escaped from the Nazi death camp in France, climbed across the Pyrenean Mountains, and found his way to Spain? He can still spot the snow-covered trail winding down, shining in the mist. It is fading out now, vanishing into a cloud, into fog. 

      No, it is not fog anymore but a storm, a raging storm at sea. There he stands, aboard the deck of a small ship, straining to see the dreamy
    outline of a new shore: Israel. There is a certain glint, the vivid, restless glint of the wanderer, playing in his eyes. 

      It is high noon, but the room is dark. The blinds are drawn. Only a thin plume of daylight reaches in somehow, and writes a bright dot against the shadows. If—like him—you waited long enough, you could actually see the dot bleeding slowly, steadily across the bare floor, rising up over the wall, becoming longer and longer still, until at long last it would fade out, like a sentence unfinished. 

      Dark circles can be noticed around his eyes; which suddenly brings to mind a tired animal, one that has not felt sunshine for a long time. The eyelids fall shut and at once, the glint is gone. An invisible hand is writing on the wall. He knows it in his heart. He bears it in fear and silence.

      And then, trying to ignore the ticking, the loud, insistent ticking of the clock from the adjacent kitchen, you too would, perhaps, start sensing a presence. Voices would be coming from a different place, a place within. A faint footfall… A soft laughter... Who is there? He glances nervously at the entrance door. Is it locked? Can a stranger get in? Then—quite unexpectedly—the fear subsides and for the first time, gives way to something else. Something wells up in his throat. Why, why is the door locked?

      He feels a sudden urge to crawl down, get to that threshold, and cry. Mommy! Open the door! Let me in, mommy! Let me come home! But for now, he can still hold it in. He forces himself to turn away from that door. Somehow it feels lighter in the dark. The bareness of this space, which was once adorned with rich Persian rugs, colorful oil paintings and fine furnishings, is more bearable this way. So is the weight of loneliness.

      Opposite from him, playing out endlessly, unintelligibly and in quick succession on the TV screen, are strange images from unfamiliar places. Noise. He lets the images come. He lets them go. He has no will. He has no curiosity. But from time to time he stirs, despite the sharp, sudden pain in his wrist. He fumbles at the remote control, wondering why the sound is so distant, so mute. And yet—no matter how much he tries—he finds it impossible to fix that which is broken. The shelves behind him are laden with books, three of which he has written himself in years past. Signed: Blue Wolf.

      Here is the poet, a man notorious for his contradictions, a man of a great passion and an equally great skill to capture it, to put it in beautiful, eloquent words in any one of ten languages. Here is the storyteller whose listeners have left him. Locked in a world of no sound, in a world of no expression, here he is: a cage within cage. This is the place where even the wolf surrenders. The fight is over. No more howling. 

      Here, at last, is my father. 

      His First Home

      Uvi Poznansky, 2004

      Here is the place—he can bring it back—his first home. 

      Straight ahead is the door with a big handle high above. He can easily reach it, standing on the tips of his toes and pushing, pushing forward. It opens! Here is the room, which he shares with his sister, Batia. He is three yours old; she is five. And somehow he knows: she will come in later, much later. He can climb into bed now. Sleep is coming; he can feel it. Sleep is almost here. 

      It weighs heavily on his lids, but—for just a second—he can lift his dreamy gaze and look up at the painted ceiling. Half of it is night, with a large crescent moon surrounded by a swirl of stars, the other half—day, with a bright, yellow sun. He rubs his eyes, astonished. Nothing like this has ever happened before: They stir! The sun, the moon and the glowing stars—they all seem to move, seem to turn overhead... 

      Then, all of the sudden, amidst the glow, he finds himself standing at the banks of a lake with his daddy. He lets go of his daddy’s hand, flings a stone and at once he can spot—right there, in the middle of the lake—a ripple taking shape. One circle rises magically inside another, widening, riding out farther and farther until at long last it fades out. White lilies can be seen floating all around. One of them is right here, at arms reach. Only a thin line, the line of illusion, separates the petal from its white reflection. And underneath it, schools of golden fish scurry in one direction, then take a sharp turn and flow elsewhere. 

      And from somewhere in the distance he can hear a shrill sound: the whistle of a train. Soon, Zeev knows, it will go out of earshot again, as the train travels past the hills, going away on its mysterious journey, calling him to come, calling him to follow.

      A Child on a Wagon

      Uvi Poznansky, 2004

      There he sits, pressed in between bundles and things that keep rattling around him, on top of a horse-driven wagon. Looking up at his parents he can sense something big, something fearful and unspoken casting a shadow over them; and they bend their heads together over him and his sister. He can see an endless line in front, an endless line in back—horses and wagons, wagons and horses as far as the eye can see—all advancing towards the same gray, unclear horizon, all escaping towards the same destination: Unknown.

      The sun rises in front of the wagons, and sets behind them. Towns appear and disappear. Rivers pass by, then forests, brick houses, motels. In Minsk they stop. He finds the three-story hotel quite fascinating at first, especially the curved rail of the staircase, which is meant, no doubt, for sliding down and yelling at the top of your voice. Of course, landing down on your butt, he finds out, is an entirely different matter—and so is the harsh, unforgiving look cast down at him by the hotelkeeper.

      They settle down for the night. In the rented room, his mommy blesses the Sabbath candles. Her hands are tightly clasped, her eyes closed. And early the next morning they mount the wagon again, and the journey goes on in the dim light, guided by nothing but an instinct to survive, farther and farther away from home. Squinting at the rising sun, Zeev finds it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. His mind is going numb listening to the wheels as they spin and turn, spin and turn, beating incessantly against the mud.

      Cold rain starts coming down at him, sheet after sheet, and streaming in the same direction is the wet mane of the horse. Its head keeps bobbing up and down, up and down in front. When will it end? Where can they go?

      Many days pass by—he cannot count them any more—until, one evening, as they travel along the river, a big town comes into view, closer and closer against the smoky blue backdrop of the Ural Mountains.

      This, his daddy tells him, is Saratov.


    Prev Next
Online Read Free Novel Copyright 2016 - 2025