On My Thirtieth Birthday Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

At thirty, my father's heart burst
While playing
Rebbe Levi Yitzhok's melody on a violin at night.
The fiddle trembled on his shoulder like a child
And its tongue —
A shining magnet —
Attracted
The wide world to the shadowy hut
Where I, a seven-year-old dreamer,
Wound around
My father's knees.

It was in luminous Siberia.
Was.
A sunstain
Or the hot tongue
Of a freezing wolf —
Licked the snow on the windowpane
And could not melt it all. —
Its light
Illuminated the staccato sounds
Of the violin
And striped my wet eye with sparks.
Suddenly, my pale father
Clutched his heart,
Twitched,
Shook
With outstretched arm,
And on my small hands
His body fell
Along with the violin,
Like a heavy branch
Falling on a light wave
And the wave bears it away.
Above us, hovered a melody.
Below, on the floor,
My father gasping, breathless.
And either I made it up
Or my words are true:
Lying thus,
Bound to a cold silence forever,
His lips entrusted me:
— That's how, my child,
Try out on your hands the weight of life,
So you get used to
Bearing it later.
That moment
The poet in me was born.
I sensed:

Somewhere in my body a seed lies waiting,
Carrying in its entrails
A special mission.
It seemed: I became the lord
Of forests,
Men,
Things,
And all I see
Is my embodied wish.
Since then it follows me,
Father's lucid will:
— That's how, my child,
Try out on your hands the weight of life,
So you get used to
Bearing it later.

Now
I have myself run up to my father's age.
Run up —
And no road back
And none ahead.
And when I see my face
In a mirror,
From its waves flows up
My distant father.
And maybe I am he, and my years
Are just a link
From his departed life?
The same face as his,
Evoking snow on windowpanes;
The same heart,
Prepared to burst,
And like my father,
I have a red violin:
See, I tear my veins
And play on them my melody!

But no one is there
To wind around my knees
And weigh my life,
To carry on
Like a wind
My yearning cloud
To a clear goal —
There
Where all words come to rest,
Where days meet
Which never met before.

Like a stone, I clutch in my fist
My thirty years
And hurl them in the abyss
Of a cold mirror.

Vilna Ghetto, August 1943