Never Did I Ask

By Baruch Cohen

To Mother:

Never did I ask why dawns are red
Never did I ask why flags are like hawthorns
Never did I ask why flowers look tearful in those mornings
Never did I ask why dusks don’t lose their splendour

I always saw Mother’s tears
How she wiped them with her handkerchief, I never saw.
I always saw brows shining with sweat
I always saw how grains burst under sun
But a fruit without lamenting, I never saw

I always understood man’s sigh

I always looked for that gushing spring

Never did I ask why mountains stab the sky’s back
Never did I ask why the sun refreshes itself in Earth’s poems
Never did I ask why stars whisper to me with their twilight

All these things I received, the whole Universe
Like Mother’s warm caresses
All these things I received, just like my Mother’s earthly end--
I never asked.
I never asked why my Mother’s warm lips no longer whispered lullabies,
Why those hands no longer kneaded the leavened yeast
Or why my Mother’s eyes no longer saw
The great seal of suffering,
Life…

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. The initial draft of this poem, written in 1952, was translated from Romanian by Alex Enescu, a CIJR student-intern & editor of Dateline: Middle East.)