This poem is about my mother, and it's
based on the motherly advice, which maybe some of you
still remember.
I don't know whether modern mothers still
have this advice that you should never sleep
with flowers in your room.
Always take out flowers from bedrooms.
And even in hospitals, the nurses in the evening
rush to get out all the flowers.
I always think, what do they do with all these flowers now?
But, anyhow, it has some scientific reason
with oxygen and nitrogen and something like that.
But no one has ever died of a death of flowers.
And so I think this advice-- and, actually,
it's very funny that all of us keep
these kinds of almost silly or foolish advice, or anyhow
very unimportant advice, with us and the real advice
we never take with us because we don't do it.
So I think mothers and fathers have long given up
to have this advice, and they just
limit themselves to this kind of almost ridiculous advice.
And these stay with us.
That's the strange thing.
I remember in World War Two in the Jewish brigade group,
we had a song in Hebrew, which a mother or sending a letter
to her son, and it went that--
if you go to attack the enemy, never
forget to wear a sweater, which, again, is one of these advices.
But if you come to think of it-- and it
was meant to be funny because soldiers
want to overcome the deep fear, so they
make fun of all these things.
But, actually, I think this advice is just
a kind of representative of the real thing she wanted to say.
Actually, this mother wanted to say, don't go to war at all,
and if you see the enemy, run as fast as you can.
But she knows it won't help.
So it's actually this advice which we carry around with us.
"My mother once told me not to sleep with flowers in the room.
Since then, I have not slept with flowers.
I sleep alone without them.
There were many flowers, but I've never had enough time,
and the persons I love are already pushing themselves away
from my life like boats away from the shore.
My mother said not to sleep with flowers.
You won't sleep.
You won't sleep, mother of my childhood.
The banister I clung to when they dragged me off to school
is long since burned, but my hands clinging
remain clinging."