HE DREAMS OF GIOTTO, DREAMS OF VITEBSK
by DB Jonas
Prodigies of the cerulean air,
the dark-eyed angels hover unaware
that they are even angels here,
and innocent of hope, innocent
of fear, they drift across a peopled sky,
the smiling ox beside his slaughterer,
and everywhere the tender-visaged lambs,
the fishes, donkeys, serpents and fawning lions,
the unrampant griffin, the best-beloved,
a tallit-shrouded man, a man
who hangs upon a tree, the roseate,
the dove-winged Shechinah,
and proud rouged cockerels upside-down
over the town, leavening the heavy sod
of their noonday burials like lifted pollen,
like ashes descending
onto a world ungarmented,
into this shofar-shattered dawn,
like anthems pitched to drift
into a luminous, star-blistered dark,
rising into this, his buoyant crepuscule.