When I Arrived the Place Was

Notes

The poem is untitled, so we used its first line in our final version.

* This is a biblical image denoting mourning - as in the Book of Esther, Chapter 4, line 4 (Context: Haman, the king's prince, issued an edict commanding that all the Jews in Babylon be killed): ‘And in every province, whenever the king's command and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and most of them lay in sackcloth and ashes'. TR replaced ‘ashes' with ‘dust'. Yet, I expect most Israeli readers of this type of poetry would probably get the hint.