Years I Walked at Your Side: Selected Poems

Finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry presented by the Jewish Book Council

from At Your Side

Years I walked at your side

like our prophet Isaiah

barefoot naked and bare

I will put on no cover

until you see me

until you recognize an other

one person

at least

and so know yourself as well

Mordechai Geldman came of age as a poet in the seventies, an auspicious and transformative time in the development of modern Hebrew literature, as poets and writers rejected the flowery, the hyperbolic, and the sentimental and opted instead for a more direct and intimate speech. While his early poems tended to rely on linguistic exploration, his vision soon turned inward, as he came to favor the simple, the true, the authentic. Geldman’s poems are direct and accessible, touching on and revealing the divine and the sacred in the so-called mundane.