A TOAST
by Ilya Kaminski

If you will it, it is no dream
-- Herzl

 

October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl
gassed in her prayer. Memory,
I whisper, stay awake.

In my veins
long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come
right our of the eighteenth century,
Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination
is the only word.
Imagination! a young girl dancing polka,
unafraid, betrayed by the Lord's death
(or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah
was postponed).

In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning
poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages
where I, my fathers,
unable to describe your dreams, drink
my silence from a cup.

 

ILYA KAMINSKY was born in Odessa, formerly the Soviet Union, and moved to the U.S. in 1993. He has won the National Russian Essay Contest, the National Shepardi Prize for Poetry, and most recently the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine. In 1999–2000, Ilya served as a George Bennett Fellow Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. His manuscript, Dancing In Odessa received the Dorsett Prize and will be published by Tupelo Press in April 2004; it was (twice) a finalist for the National Poetry Series and also for the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Kaminsky received the Florence Kahn Memorial Award and the Milton Center’s Award for Excellence in Writing. Current work appears or is forthcoming in New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Tikkun, Southeast Review. Ilya Kaminsky also writes poetry in Russian. His work in that language was recently chosen for 'Bunker Poetico" at the 2001 Venice Biennial.

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