Evening

[ My English language poem, “Evening”, was accepted into a program called “Moving Words” (https://www.artsbythepeople.org/2021-moving-words). It is an international collaborative project between writers and art animators.

An artist called Norwendy (her name in private life is Yana Voronkova) created an animated movie based on my poem. Gleb Lobovsky also took part in the creation of the movie. The voice reading the poem is my own.

Norwendy  is an artist, animator and illustrator. Her work can be found here: https://norwendy17.myportfolio.com/work as well as on Instagram. She lives in Haifa, Israel, and is starting her senior year in Art College Wizo.

I am grateful to Norwendy for her work on the movie. It was a wonderful, surprising and exciting experience for me to see my text and my voice come to life in a completely different creative space, imagined anew.

The illustration for the poem comes from Norwendy’s work and is reproduced here with her permission.

The movie can be seen on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNhNJIdXIJM ]
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     EVENING

The sun touches the horizon.

You ask me at what price
I would agree to un-live this day.

What would bring me back
to the garden which suffers no winter,
lush at the confluence of pleasing seasons,
honeyed with the sun eternally at zenith.

What would it take to make me spit out
the burning taste of the knowledge
of Good and Evil,
to once again mouth only sweetness.

The last light is fading.

You tell me:
This is not a moment to drive a hard bargain.
 
True.
Тhere is nothing I can hold onto —
all that I love is mortal,
memories are shadowed with loss,
my very life is impermanence.
The tearing away is not gentle.

You offer a sliver of time
to outrun the nightfall.
 
Dusk deepens into darkness.

You ask me again at what price
I would un-tell my story,
let you have back the blank page,
erase the beginning,
escape the end.