Meshullam Depiera (early C.13th - after 1260)

How Could You Press For Song

How could you press for song from me,
    when my tongue is tied and I'm unworthy,
and pleasure now is gone from poetry,
    until Time restores it to me.
And since my flute's music was halted,
    my mind was settled on the Talmud's mystery;
the Midrash is what I seek out instead,
    and the Mishnah's become a shelter to me:
I study the rules of prayer before standing,
    bequeathal's laws in the Order of Owning,
confronting the Book of Creation's secrets
    and probing the seven letters' doubling.
What good is the verb's declension and pattern?
    Do conjugations make things happen?
Can quadrilateral forms of the verb
    teach us of arcs and expanses of circles?
Has grammar ever made a man wise?
    Are pedants appointed to lead the people?
All their distinctions just weary the spirit.
    There's nothing of worth within their linguistics
(though morphology's known to the masters of Scripture),
    and so they come to the greatness of prophets
with the wisdom of letters - hard and soft -
    hoping that grammar might cut through their haze,
or the comments of Qimhi, of blessed memory,
    and the wise one of Fez, whom they all praise.
The fight over roots and the weaving of words
    is the sole achievement of the winged-one's age.
With dots and lines they live out their days;
    their hearts heavy, they labour in vain -
for seeing the word's form is sufficient
    to know its gender and how it should change.
What are those shifting verbs to me -
    full and hollow, weak and strong?
Only eternity, and with it my honour,
    moves through me with dance-like song.

Yedi'ot HaMakhnon leHeqer HaShira Ha'Ivrit 4, no. 16, ll. 32-end. From the great great anthology of Spanish Hebrew poetry, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492, translated and edited by Peter Cole. Look it out, you won't regret it.