Pain froze you, for years-and fear-leaving scars.
But now, as though miraculously, it seems, here you are

walking easily across the ground, and into town
as though you were floating on air, which in part you are,

or riding a wave of what feels like the world's good will-
though helped along by something foreign and older than you are

and yet much younger too, inside you, and so palpable
an X-ray, you're sure, would show it, within the body you are,

not all that far beneath the skin, and even in
some bones. Making you wonder: Are you what you are-

with all that isn't actually you having flowed
through and settled in you, and made you what you are?

The pain was never replaced, nor was it quite erased.
It's memory now-so you know just how lucky you are.

You didn't always. Were you then? And where's the fear?
Inside your words, like an engine? The car you are?!

Face it, friend, you most exist when you're driven
away, or on-by forms and forces greater than you are.

Internet source: Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cole 

" Peter Cole is an American poet who lives in Jerusalem. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2007.

Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1957. He moved to Jerusalem in 1981. His first book of poems, Rift, was published by Station Hill Press in 1989, and Hymns & Qualms came out with the Sheep Meadow Press in 1998. The two volumes were reissued as What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1988, from Shearsman Books (UK). Things on Which I've Stumbled was published by New Directions in the fall of 2008. He has translated works by the great Hebrew poets of medieval Spain, including Shmuel HaNagid, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and many others. A comprehensive and highly praised anthology of five hundred years of this poetry was published by Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Translation in 2007 and garnered wide acclaim. He has also published award-winning translations of modern Arabic and Hebrew poets and prose writers, among them Taha Muhammad Ali, Aharon Shabtai, Yoel Hoffmann, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, and Harold Schimmel. Peter Cole is also one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small literary press based in Jerusalem that publishes English translations of Arabic, Hebrew, French, Greek, Ladino, and the other languages of the Levant.

He is the recipient of numerous other honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has received the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the TLS Translation Prize, the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Translation, the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, the Hawkins Prize for Book of the Year from the Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, and the G.E. Younger Writers' Award.

Cole has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Middlebury College."