Maia Evrona

Poet; Memoirist; Translator

Black and white photograph of Maia Evrona

Black and white photograph of Maia Evrona

  

One Way to Say Goodbye

He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.

© Maia Evrona 2021

Rosh HaShanah
(Rosh HeShone)

To a new year that is good and sweet
with apples dipped in sticky honey
pomegranate seeds that stain—
the true fruit that tempted Eve.
For though we are imperfect and like she
we owe our own apologies, we may remain
another year in this messy world.
Surely even God must know
a sweet beginning is a sacred need.

—Maia Evrona (First appeared in the Jewish Women’s Archive)


Poem of the Paper Bird

My paper bird is white as a dove.
My paper bird is graceful as a crane,
with its long paper neck and pointed beak.

My paper bird has sight like a hawk,
and could give you a scratch:
a stinging paper cut. 

My paper bird has a song,
beautiful as a nightingale’s,
written on each of its paper wings.

My paper bird has no iron-barred cage.
I keep my paper bird on my kitchen table
next to my paper rose.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in the 2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist Anthology)

 The Symphony of Sickness

I wheeze when I try to breathe,

and my nose is so stuffed up

it’s been transformed into an instrument

in my symphony of sickness.

My voice has changed: always weak—

a mangled flute—

now it emerges thick

from my sore and scratched-up throat.

With my fever breaking, I can take off my socks

without my feet turning blue and hurting

with a pain that attacks and lasts like the sudden crash

and lingering vibration when cymbals clash.

What a switch! I am so acutely sick

that my chronic symptoms seem faded:

I could pretend they’re only noticed

in between my ordered sneezes.

But the foghorn cough that came and went,

the throbbing migraines and creaking knees,

the sounds that sound louder than they really are,

clanging against my raw and beaten eardrums,

never did sound like this coordinated affair,

with its conductor so present and focused,

the musicians operating perfectly

on cue.

The symptoms that have droned on

and come and gone, over the years,

sometimes louder, sometimes softer,

sometimes as only a memory

echoing in my ears,

have always felt like a cacophony,

so different from this

orchestra.


 The Spirit Goes On Thinking

My spirit thinks like a steady clock
that never has to be wound. 
It continues thinking, doesn’t stop
when illness drowns my mind in clouds.

I no longer fear its musings gone, 
aware that such meditations do go on,
ripple through some spiritual current
then wander

like an orphaned boat on water.
Before any symptom lessens  
poems may arrive on shore
full of references  

to an intricate, long-developed
school of thought, 
volumes of tractates, 
a bible. 
 
I have a long scroll in my soul
filled with thoughts I cannot find
with my mind--a journal
my spirit is writing all the time. 

These words just now arriving
follow an entry on that scroll
written days and days and days ago
as my sprit went on ticking.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Poetry East)

 

Poetry Publications: 

(Click titles for links)

-“Days of Awe” and “Kol Nidrei II”

Berru Poetry Series, an online publication from the Jewish Book Council, September 13th 2021

-“Chanukah,”

101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Ashland Poetry Press, 1/1/2021

-“In Istanbul”

Ember; A Journal of Luminous Things

-“Portbou” and “Shabbat”

Mozaika Magazine; June 18th, 2020

-“Shavuot”

Mozaika Magazine; May 2020

-“Rosh Hashanah” and “Yom Kippur”

The Jewish Women’s Archive, September 2019

-“Maia; From the Greek,” “The Inquisition in Córdoba,” “Returning to Hydra,” “Modern Hebrew,” “Childhood Spanish; Coda”

Europe Now; June/July 2019

-"Purim-Shpiel,”

Jewish Currents, March 2019

-”The Symphony of Sickness,”

The Coachella Review; Winter 2018

-"The Painting" and "Flowers and Wine,"

Gravel, September 2018

-"Kol Nidrei"

North American Review; Spring 2019

-"Tel Aviv"

Daphne Magazine; Issue 05

-"Caminos de Sefarad"

Zona de Carga/Loading Zone, Issue Number 9, Spring 2018

-"Greenpoint Sublet"

Habitat Magazine; Issue 3, Spring 2018

-"The Birds of My Childhood" and "I, Maia"

Deluge; Number 10

-"Hidden Yiddish"

One Sentence Poems, December 2017

*Also included in English and in Yiddish translation, in Radiant Jargon; Six Poems about Yiddish, an anthology of poems about Yiddish recently published by the Yiddish Book Center.

-"Adult Yiddish" and "Maia / מיה; Translation from Hebrew"

One Sentence Poems, March 2017

-"Childhood Spanish"

Poetica Magazine, Fall 2016

-"Tu B'Shevat"

Valparaiso Poetry Review, Volume XVII, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2016

-"The City" 

Story Magazine; Migrations Issue, Spring 2016

-"Vilna" and "In Yemin Moshe"

New South; Issue 8.1; Spring 2015

-"The Spirit Goes On Thinking" 

Poetry East; Numbers 80 & 81; Fall 2013

-"Late Afternoon"

Prairie Schooner; Fall 2012

-"Poem of the Paper Bird" 

2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist Anthology

Prizes:

2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize for "Over Jerusalem"

 

Listen to me recite some of my favorite poems on soundcloud: 

https://soundcloud.com/maia-evrona



  

Late Afternoon
On Cape Cod

Shivering on this sandbar, I wait for my father
to notice the late hour: time to come
with the blow-up crocodile, the blow-up boat--

Time to take me back from here
where I’m stuck, held yet far off,
like the kites in the air,

and even if he carries me with my arms tight around him,
a film of salt and water will be between our skin
as the blow-up boat glides along empty in the sea.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Prairie Schooner)









Vilna

There was that strange scent both times I went:
almost unpleasant, kept me recalling
that blood once ran through the cobblestone streets

yet it was tender like grass in the rain.
Each time I arrived amid plenty of rain,
but I’m certain the days lasted longer

the first time, the first summer,
just as that month seemed longer
than when I went anywhere

again for a month, bled into the months
and the years I walked down after
those white evenings in summer.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in New South)

 

Childhood Spanish

 

Language I learned en la escuela primaria,

en una programa bilingüe, language of homework

and a terrifying third grade teacher, language I feared

forgotten after every summer.

 

Language of nearly none of my ancestors,

except those fleeing Sephardim, 

who dispersed in all directions

and, I’ve read, through all Ashkenazim.

 

Language once purged, still so Catholic,

school seemed parochial by mistake,

as if my native English needn’t be selective,

purged of Jew-you-down and good Christian praise.

 

Language that feels so American,

not the Russian, the German, the Polish

my grandparents’ parents fled Europe fluent in

and shed, keeping only Yiddish.

 

Language that confused my English pronunciation,

loosened my accent, further cultivated in me

the seeds of a rootless cosmopolitan,

even here, in the Land of the Free.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in Poetica Magazine)

  

Hidden Yiddish


Perhaps there is memory growing out of oblivion,
a miracle happening on a journey,
as the nightingale sings an aching soliloquy
buried in the forests of Poland.

--Maia Evrona (First appeared in One Sentence Poems, now available in English and in Yiddish in Radiant Jargon; Six Poems about Yiddish, published by the National Yiddish Book Center)


Kol Nidrei I


May it be played by Casals,

my beloved Yom-Kippur-goy

of the cello. Perhaps he also

has vows to renounce,

an ancestor forced to convert

rather than burn, forebears

who wished to return.

He’s summoning them now

with his strings, with his bow,

grieving them now.


First appeared in the North American Review

Kol Nidrei II

 

Or perhaps it’s most fitting played by Du Pré, her force

like an electric light sparking out. She who too

would come to know lack of choice,

 

as I do, as I recall strings like knives

slicing lines on my fingertips, otherwise

blue-tinged and numb, stiff as I tried

 

to learn the guitar; I with my lingering tremor,

who for years lacked strength to sit upright,

cradling a cello, to suspend a bow in the air;

 

I who still fail to fast lest my blood sugar fall,

lived in terror of plans and of promises, knowing all

vows may be broken when the body falls ill. 


First appeared in the Berru Poetry Series

 


Flowers and Wine 

You brought me flowers and wine

for my twentieth birthday,

flowers and wine

when I was still flowers to you.

 

I became wine:

neither sweet nor bitter but full

of the heady memory of sweetness

and bitterness,

the possibility of both.

 

I have seen how we, the haunted, the traumatized,

sometimes fill our glasses too fast to the brim,

clink them together too hard, making wine overflow,

searching in that complicated taste for sweetness,

searching in one another,

accustomed to the sweet accompanied by the bitter. 

 

Sometimes I gulp down what I should sip,

as all of life rocks back and forth between seeming

like a fading memory,

and something terrifying, yet intoxicating.

I don’t know how one lives with the sobriety

of life that doesn’t attack

 

or why any kindness makes

my mouth fill,

as it fills all of a sudden

with blood when I bite my tongue,

fill with the bitterness I have choked down in my life.

 

I was always careful when you reached out your hands

not to hold them tightly in mine

but to only let my fingers rest

limply in them, like the stems

of freshly-cut flowers

due to the headiness of wine. 

(First published in Gravel)



Portbou

To leisurely travel here to Portbou
where others have fled through.
To exist as a tourist in a world
full of others running for refuge.

And to stroll down the narrow
streets of nearby towns, drinking
chocolate, and notice the hollows
where mezuzahs were torn away from stone.

A few decades ago, in another century,
the refugee would have been me,
in another few years perhaps it will be.

Here I am admiring the sea. To be
a tourist can be a beautiful thing.
Strange in a world of tourists and refugees.

(First published in Mozaika)

Photograph of the cemetery in Portbou, Spain

Photograph of the cemetery in Portbou, Spain

Reading of the poem Chanukah on Youtube

“Chanukah” from 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. Photo with candle.

“Chanukah” from 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. Photo with candle.



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Copyright: Maia Evrona, 2013. All rights reserved.