Passing a butchers’ market

The poet here contemplates death, inspired by the bloody scene of a butchers’ market. Each line ends with the same rhyming syllable, dam, which means “blood” in Hebrew. Observing the animals awaiting the butcher’s knife and the men at the bakery next door, he ponders the cosmic order that arbitrarily places one group at the mercy of the other. Hovering in the background are the verses from Ecclesiastes 3:19–21, which state that humans have no superiority over animals. The last line is a direct quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:13, usually translated as “this is all there is of man.”