The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (10 page)

my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.

For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,

not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with

buttons and zippers and spools of thread

in every color and snaps and buckles.

A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too

had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.

I explained to him in my heart about all the decades

and the causes and the events, why I am now here

and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates prayer.

He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate

and I returned, with all the worshipers, home.

6

It’s not time that keeps me far away from my childhood,

it’s this city and everything in it.
Now

I’ve got to learn Arabic too, to reach all the way to Jericho

from both ends of time; and the length of walls has been added

and the height of towers and the domes of prayer houses

whose area is immeasurable.
All these

really broaden my life and force me

always to emigrate once more from the smell

of river and forest.

My life is stretched out this way; it grows very thin

like cloth, transparent.
You can see right through me.

7

In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred

and blind love, I’m beginning to believe again

in all the little things that will fill

the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass,

perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind.

I think of children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers

and half in the science of war.

The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside

and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of

the messenger of good tidings.

8

The city plays hide-and-seek among her names:

Yerushalayim, Al-Quds, Salem, Jeru, Yeru, all the while

whispering her first, Jebusite name: Y’vus,

Y’vus, Y’vus, in the dark.
She weeps

with longing: Ælia Capitolina, Ælia, Æ
lia.

She comes to any man who calls her

at night, alone.
But we know

who comes to whom.

9

On an open door a sign hangs: Closed.

How do you explain it?
Now

the chain is free at both ends: there is no

prisoner and no warden, no dog and no master.

The chain will gradually turn into wings.

How do you explain it?

Ah well, you’ll explain it.

10

Jerusalem is short and crouched among its hills,

unlike New York, for example.

Two thousand years ago she crouched

in the marvelous starting-line position.

All the other cities ran ahead, did long

laps in the arena of time, they won or lost,

and died.
Jerusalem remained in the starting-crouch:

all the victories are clenched inside her,

hidden inside her.
All the defeats.

Her strength grows and her breathing is calm

for a race even beyond the arena.

11

Loneliness is always in the middle,

protected and fortified.
People were supposed

to feel secure in that, and they don’t.

When they go out, after a long time,

caves are formed for the new solitaries.

What do you know about Jerusalem.

You don’t need to understand languages;

they pass through everything as if through the ruins of houses.

People are a wall of moving stones.

But even in the Wailing Wall

I haven’t seen stones as sad as these.

The letters of my pain are illuminated

like the name of the hotel across the street.

What awaits me and what doesn’t await me.

12

Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can

feel pain.
It has a network of nerves.

From time to time Jerusalem crowds into

mass protests like the tower of Babel.

But with huge clubs God-the-Police beats her

down: houses are razed, walls flattened,

and afterward the city disperses, muttering

prayers of complaint and sporadic screams from churches

and synagogues and loud-moaning mosques.

Each to his own place.

13

Always beside ruined houses and iron girders

twisted like the arms of the slain, you find

someone who is sweeping the paved path

or tending the little garden, sensitive

paths, square flower-beds.

Large desires for a horrible death are well cared-for

as in the monastery of the White Brothers next to the Lions’ Gate.

But farther on, in the courtyard, the earth gapes:

columns and arches supporting vain land

and negotiating with one another: crusaders and guardian angels,

a sultan and Rabbi Yehuda the Pious.
Arched vaults with a

column, ransom for prisoners, and strange conditions in rolled-up

contracts, and sealing-stones.
Curved hooks holding

air.

Capitals and broken pieces of columns scattered like chessmen

in a game that was interrupted in anger,

and Herod, who already, two thousand years ago, wailed

like mortar shells.
He knew.

14

If clouds are a ceiling, I would like to

sit in the room beneath them: a dead kingdom rises

up from me, up, like steam from hot food.

A door squeaks: an opening cloud.

In the distances of valleys someone rapped iron against stone

but the echo erects large, different things in the air.

Above the houses—houses with houses above them.
This is

all of history.

This learning in schools without roof

and without walls and without chairs and without teachers.

This learning in the absolute outside,

a learning short as a single heartbeat.
All of it.

15

I and Jerusalem are like a blind man and a cripple.

She sees for me

out to the Dead Sea, to the End of Days.

And I hoist her up on my shoulders

and walk blind in my darkness underneath.

16

On this bright autumn day

I establish Jerusalem once again.

The foundation scrolls

are flying in the air, birds, thoughts.

God is angry with me

because I always force him

to create the world once again

from chaos, light, second day, until

man, and back to the beginning.

17

In the morning the shadow of the Old City falls

on the New.
In the afternoon—vice versa.

Nobody profits.
The muezzin’s prayer

is wasted on the new houses.
The ringing

bells roll like balls and bounce back.

The shout of
Holy, Holy, Holy
from the synagogues will fade

like gray smoke.

At the end of summer I breathe this air

that is burnt and pained.
My thoughts have

the stillness of many closed books:

many crowded books, with most of their pages

stuck together like eyelids in the morning.

18

I climb up the Tower of David

a little higher than the prayer that ascends the highest:

halfway to heaven.
A few of

the ancients succeeded: Mohammed, Jesus,

and others.
Though they didn’t find rest in heaven;

they just entered a higher excitement.
But

the applause for them hasn’t stopped ever since,

down below.

19

Jerusalem is built on the vaulted foundations

of a held-back scream.
If there were no reason

for the scream, the foundations would crumble, the city would collapse;

if the scream were screamed, Jerusalem would explode into the heavens.

20

Poets come in the evening into the Old City

and they emerge from it pockets stuffed with images

and metaphors and little well-constructed parables

and crepuscular similes from among columns and crypts,

from within darkening fruit

and delicate filigree of hammered hearts.

I lifted my hand to my forehead

to wipe off the sweat

and found I had accidentally raised up

the ghost of Else Lasker-Schüler.

Light and tiny as she was

in her life, all the more so in her death.
Ah, but

her poems.

21

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

The Temple Mount is a huge ship, a magnificent

luxury liner.
From the portholes of her Western Wall

cheerful saints look out, travelers.
Hasidim on the pier

wave goodbye, shout hooray, hooray, bon voyage!
She is

always arriving, always sailing away.
And the fences and the piers

and the policemen and the flags and the high masts of churches

and mosques and the smokestacks of synagogues and the boats

of psalms of praise and the mountain-waves.
The shofar blows: another one

has just left.
Yom Kippur sailors in white uniforms

climb among ladders and ropes of well-tested prayers.

And the commerce and the gates and the golden domes:

Jerusalem is the Venice of God.

22

Jerusalem is Sodom’s sister-city,

but the merciful salt didn’t have mercy on her

and didn’t cover her with a silent whiteness.

Jerusalem is an unconsenting Pompeii.

History books that were thrown into the fire,

their pages are strewn about, stiffening in red.

An eye whose color is too light, blind,

always shattered in a sieve of veins.

Many births gaping below,

a womb with numberless teeth,

a double-edged woman and the holy beasts.

The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea

and set in her: a terrible mistake.

Sky fish were caught in a net of alleys,

tearing one another to pieces.

Jerusalem.
An operation that was left open.

The surgeons went to take a nap in faraway skies,

but her dead gradually

formed a circle, all around her,

like quiet petals.

My God.

My stamen.

Amen.

The Bull Returns

The bull returns from his day of work in the ring

after a cup of coffee with his opponents,

having left them a note with his address and

the exact location of the red scarf.

The sword remains in his stiff-necked neck.

And when he’s usually at home.
Now

he sits on his bed, with his heavy