Recipe for a good poem

ELISHA PORAT

Take the painful remembrance of your childhood,
Overlay it with the greening patina
Of the memory of the years and the words.
And then, with your sharpened pencil, peel it,
Carve it up violently, so that it breaks as
With a scalpel, until it reaches the living flesh.

Translated from the Hebrew by Asher Harris in December, 2004.

Elisha Porat writes on a kibbutz in Israel.

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