Red clay spun into motion by strange divine fingertips
Illegible meaning swirls too fast to guess
Every moment whirls me from gantz back to nisht
Ever revolving around illegible axioms
Constantly blurring between all and nothing
Yet always rotation perceptibly slows
Every second bringing me closer to an answer
Every moment my meaning becomes clearer
Final rotations can almost be read
Everything to nothing, gain to loss, around, around, around,
Waiting in earnest expectation until--
Nisht.
Author's Note--
The first few verses of this poem were written in Hebrew, but I quickly realized that a) nobody here is likely to know Hebrew and b) I don't know enough words to say everything I want to say, so I translated it to english to finish it. That's why it's worded a bit strangely, and I wanted to point out a couple oddities to help the poem be properly understood. Firstly, the first word(s) of the poem, "red clay", was originally "אדמה" or "adamah", and was meant to reference both the clay traditionally used to make a dreidle(though not red), and the Hebrew word for "human", "אדם" or "adam".
Secondly, two Hebrew words were left untranslated, "gantz" and "nisht", which mean "everything" and "nothing" respectively. I left them as-is because they're two of the faces on the dreidle, which inspired the poem, and I didn't want to lose the reference.
Thank you for reading!
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