Yehuda Amichai: My Father

The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits
out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands
overflowed with good deeds.

Yehuda Amichai: Near the Wall of a House

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

Yehuda Amichai: Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Yehuda Amichai: An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.

Yehuda Amichai: Forgetting Someone

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

Yehuda Amichai: Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire 

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 

but rather 

as in the heart when the excitement is over 

and you can talk only about a great weariness. 

I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 

A peace 

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without 

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 

light, floating, like lazy white foam. 

A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? 

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 

to the next, as in a relay race: 

the baton never falls.)

 

Let it come 

like wildflowers, 

suddenly, because the field 

must have it: wildpeace.

Yehuda Amichai: The Place Where We Are Right

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world

like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

Yehuda Amichai: I Don't Know If History Repeats Itself

I don't Know if history repeats itself
But I do know that you don't.

I remember that city was divided 
Not only between Jews and Arabs,
But between me and you,
When we were there together.

We made ourselves a womb of dangers
We built ourselves a house of deadening wars

Like men of far north
Who build themselves a safe warm house of deadening ice.

The city has been reunited
But we haven't been there together.
By now I know
That History doesn't repeat itself,
As I always knew that you wouldn't. 

Yehuda Amichai: Once a Great Love

Once a great love cut my life in two.
The first part goes on twisting
at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The passing years have calmed me
and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

And I'm like someone standing in the Judean desert, looking at a sign:
"Sea Level"
He cannot see the sea, but he knows.

Thus I remember your face everywhere
at your "face level." 

Yehuda Amichai: A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

Yehuda Amichai: The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters 

and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, 

with four dead and eleven wounded. 

And around these, in a larger circle 

of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered 

and one graveyard. But the young woman 

who was buried in the city she came from, 

at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, 

enlarges the circle considerably, 

and the solitary man mourning her death 

at the distant shores of a country far across the sea 

includes the entire world in the circle. 

And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans 

that reaches up to the throne of God and 

beyond, making 

a circle with no end and no God.