Celia Dropkin (1887–1956) was born in Belarus, and studied and taught in Warsaw and Kiev. She immigrated to the United States in 1912, following her husband, who had been forced to flee czarist Russia. In New York she reconnected with her native Yiddish and helped to regenerate it as a modern poetic language. Celebrated both as a female poet and an innovative modernist writer, Dropkin often explored sexual themes in her work. Her poetry collection, In heysn vint, lider (In the Hot Wind: Poems), was published 1935. After her death an expanded edition of her works was published under the title In heysn vint: Poems, Stories, and Pictures.

Four Poems

by Celia Dropkin, translated by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon

A Field

There’s nothing more moving than a field
with baby things springing up
between stones and parched earth,
opening their thirsty mouths
to the heavens.
Washed out, bright pale,
they smile out from heaped earth
damp from the rain
like babies on black breasts.

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