from Réflexions Poétique — Blackbird Archive

← v17n2, Fall 2018

from Réflexions Poétiques

The Word is far.

One can’t attract it through will. In vain, hands are outstretched in space, they will not grasp that which is far.

One lives days, months, years in the sweet hope, that she will come —the hour of elevation, of creation. She does not come—she is always far.

One talks of oneself only with oneself.

language translation spirituality

Ary Justman

Ary Justman (1888–1919) was a Polish poet born in Warsaw. He arrived in Paris around 1910, where he later met the sculptor Chana Orloff; they married in 1916. Justman published poems alongside Orloff’s visual work in the journal SIC and the two collaborated on one book, Réflexions Poétiques ( SIC Editions, 1916), which included poems by Justman and visual work by Orloff. Justman contracted influenza while a volunteer with the Red Cross, and died January 12, 1919 at the age of thirty-one—a little more than two months after his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The names of both men are inscribed on the Pantheon among 560 foreign poets who “died for France.” Justman was survived by his wife, Chana Orloff, and their one-year-old son.