I take an oath of loyalty to the table / coated with white Formica, a cup full of pens, the ashtray / I dreamed that the State had passed out of existence / and with our children / we'd settled down in the three volumes of the / dictionary."(Shabtai, 39) Also, in Our Land he dramatically deplores the ugliness of his land. The poem is even more telling because of its many Biblical allusions. Thus, the people of God, as the Israeli used to be called are now murderers, and the land is covered in shame. In a violent, scathing image, Shabtai depicts the sky as the "broad buttocks of the murder" that has nothing of its original purity: "We quarreled / like the body parts of the man / who brought the milk of the lioness / down from the mountains / in the legend told by Bialik. /...
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