Three sets of parents are in mourning following the abduction and murder of Israeli Jewish students, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach.
So it should have been no surprise that a poem by one of the country’s most revered writers was included among the conventional funeral prayers during yesterday’s eulogies and funerals.
After all, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion had called Natan Alterman ‘the conscience of the people’ and his poem, The Third Mother positively screamed to be somehow included on this most tragic of occasions.
Although Alterman is known best as a lyricist, he also wrote plays, short sketches, children’s books, newspaper columns and made prize-winning translations of Shakespeare, Moliere and Racine into Hebrew. He received the Israel Prize for his contribution to Israeli literature in 1968.
“The Third Mother
”Mothers are singing. Mothers are singing.
A fist of thunder bangs down. Strong silence.
Red-bearded lamps are marching
in the empty streets in rows.“Autumn mortally ill, weary,
inconsolable autumn,
rain without beginning or end.
No candle in the window, now light in the world,
three mothers sing.“I hear one of them say:
’He was here but yesterday.
I shall kiss his every fingernail and finger.
I see a tall ship in a calm bay,
and my son from the topmast hanging’.“And the second one says:
’My son is tall and quiet.
I am sewing a holiday shirt for my dear.
He's walking in the fields. He will soon be here.
And he holds in his heart a lead bullet’.“And the third mother says with her wandering eyes:
’No one was dearer or kinder...
Who shall weep when he comes if I cannot see?
I do not know where to find him’.“And she bathes her eyelashes with weeping.
Perhaps he is only resting. Perhaps
in foreign places he measures
the paths of Your world, O God,
(Like a wandering monk) with kisses’”.
© Natalie Wood (02 July 2014)
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For those of us a with conscience
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