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This week, host Marcela Sulak reads the poetry of Natan Yonatan alongside a soundtrack of songs dedicated to his poetry – each poem is accompanied by its musical version. Here is an extract from “Poems Only Go So Far”:

“Poems only go so far. It’s time we conceded that,
and break the bond of silence that we’ve shared.
Our poppies never were any redder than theirs;
our sins were never white as the drifting snow,
and it seemed we’d always be so; weary birds that never stopped
but always flew.”

Natan Yonatan was born Natan Klein in Kiev in 1923, before his family immigrated to Mandate Palestine two years later. Much of Yonatan’s poetry, which won him the Bialik Prize, is inspired by the natural world, and also by the loss of his oldest son, Lior, who fell in the Yom Kippur War at the age of 21. Yonatan died after a brief illness in 2004, at the age of 80.

Text:
Within the song to Live: Selected Poems by Natan Yonatan, translated by Janice Silverman Rebibo. Gefen Publishing 2005.

Music by Gidi Koren, performed by The Brothers and the Sisters:
If This World
After The Storm
Poems Only Go So Far
Beyond The Pass

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish