Moshe Feinstein: Two at Night (From Hebrew)

Two for Me at Night
Moshe Feinstein
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Hebrew

Two things brought to me by night:
A shriveled leaf, a blasted thing of rot
Whose shoot of green vitality was shot
Out by the passing storm, fell right
Against my window in the throes of the near-dead,
To look on desolation-soaked shrouds of the bed
And said
"Oh cold it is beneath the grave's old plank,
Cold and dank...."
And a heh heh at my window, like the bearer of great tidings, tapped �
A laugh of rapture born out of a lusty woman's warm young breast
To intimate suggestively about night secrets, and the creases of a dress
Of black.
Like a gazelle the cry cavorted through my blood 
Aroused a thirsty tremble on my lips
And said aloud: "desire, desire."
This it said
Then went off into exile of the night
Born off as a snowy bell's clear chimes
Into the distance where the blackness climbs,
The leaf still shuddering on the shrouds of my bed.

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