The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (16 page)

like a mouth.
As if the tongue of a red velvet gown were sticking out from

an antique trunk that didn’t close tight.

I was your Purim bull, your Kippurim bull,

dressed in a shroud that had the two colors of a clown.

Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da, ta-da, love and its long shofar-blasts.

Sit down.
Today is the world-pregnant day of judgment.
Who raped

the world and made the day pregnant?

Today is the day of judgment, today you, today war.

Tanks from America, fighter planes from France, Russian

jet-doves, armored chariots from England, Sisera’s regiments

who dried the swamps with their corpses, a flying Massada,

Beitar slowly sinking, Yodfat on wheels, the Antonia, ground-to-ground

ground, ground-to-air air, ground-to-sky sky.
Massada won’t fall again, won’t fall again,

won’t fall again, Massada, won’t.
Multiple automatic

prayer beads and also in single shots.
Muezzins armed with

three-stage missiles, paper-rips and battle-cries

of holy wars in all seven kinds,

shtreimls
like mines in the road and in the air, deep philosophical

depth charges, a heart lit up with a green light inside

the engine of a red-hot bomber, Elijah’s ejection-seat leaping up

at a time of danger, hurling circumcision knives, thundering

dynamite fuses from heart to heart, a Byzantine tank

with a decorated window in which an icon appears

lit up in purity and softness, mezuzahs filled with

explosives, don’t kiss them or they’ll blow up, dervishes

with powdered rococo curls, the Joint Chiefs of Staff

consisting of Job, his friends, Satan, and God, around a sand-table.

A pricking with bannered pins in the live flesh

of hills and valleys made of naked

humans lying in front of them,

underwater synagogues, periscope rabbis,

cantors out of the depths, jeeps armed with women’s hair

and with wild girls’ fingernails, ripping their

clothes in rage and mourning.
Supersonic angels

with wings of women’s fat thighs,

letters of a Torah scroll in ammunition straps, machine guns,

flowers in the pattern of a fortified bunker,

fingers of dynamite, prosthetic legs of dynamite,

eight empty bullet-shells for a Hanukkah menorah,

explosives of eternal flame, the cross of a crossfire,

a submachine gun carried in phylactery straps,

camouflage nets of thin lacy material

from girlfriends’ panties, used women’s dresses

and ripped diapers to clean the cannon mouth,

offensive hand-grenades in the shape of bells,

defensive hand-grenades in the shape of a spice box

for the close of the Sabbath, sea mines

like the prickly apples used as smelling-salts on Yom Kippur

in case of fainting, half my childhood in

a whole armored truck, a grandmother clock

for starting a time-egg filled with

clipped fingernails of bad boys

with a smell of cinnamon, Dürer’s

praying hands sticking up

like a vertical land mine, arms with an attachment

for a bayonet, a good-night fortified with sand bags,

the twelve little minor prophets

in a night ambush with warm breath,

cannon barrels climbing like ivy, shooting

cuckoo shells every fifteen minutes: cuckoo,

boom-boom.
Barbed-wire testicles,

eye-mines bulging and hurting,

aerial bombs with the heads of

beautiful women like the ones that used to be carved

on ships’ prows, the mouth of a cannon

open like flower petals,

M.I.R.V., S.W.A.T., I.C.B.M., I.B.M.,

P.O.W., R.I.P., A.W.O.L.,

S.N.A.F.U., I.N.R.I., J.D.L., L.B.J.,

E.S.P., I.R.S., D.N.A., G.O.D.

Sit down.
Today is the day of judgment.
Today there was war.

The terrible angel pulled back his arm like a spring

to his side, to rest it or to strike

again.
Keep this arm

busy, distract its muscles!
Hang

heavy ornaments on it, gold and silver, necklaces

and diamonds, so that it’s weighed down, so that it will sink and

not strike again.
Again Massada won’t fall, won’t fall.

In the mists that came from below and in the holy

bluish light, inside his huge hollow dome,

I saw the lord of all the earth in all his sadness,

a radar god lonely and turning

with his huge wings, in the sad circles

of a doubt as ancient as the world,

yes yes and no no, with the sadness of a god who realizes

there is no answer and no decision aside from that turning.

Whatever he sees is sad.
And whatever

he doesn’t see is sad, whatever he writes down

is a code of sadness for humans to decipher.

I love the bluish light and the white of his eyes

which are blind white screens

on which humans read what will befall them.

Again Massadah.
Again Massada.
Again won’t.

On one of these evenings I tried

to remember the name of the one who was killed beside me

in the pale sands of Ashod.
He was a foreigner,

perhaps one of the wandering sailors, who thought that the Jewish people

was a sea and those deadly sands were waves.
The tattoo

didn’t reveal his name, just a flower and

a dragon and fat women.
I could have

called him Flower or Fat Women.
In the first

light of retreat and dawn he died.
“In his arms

he was dead.”
Just as in the poem by Goethe.
All evening

beside windows and desks I was immersed in the effort of remembering,

like the effort of prophecy.
I knew that if I didn’t

remember his name I’d forget my own name, it would wither,

“the grass rises again.”
This too by Goethe.
The grass

doesn’t rise again, it remains trampled,

remains alive and whispering to itself.
It won’t rise,

but will never die and will not fear sudden death

under the heavy hobnailed boots.

The year the world’s condition improved

my heart got sick.
Should I conclude from this

that my life falls apart without

the sweet suffocating barrel-hoops of danger?

I’m forty-three years old.
And my father died at sixty-three.

After summer’s end comes a summer and a summer and a summer, as

on a broken record.
Dying is when the last season

never changes again.

And the body is the wax of the soul’s memorial candle

that drips and gathers and piles up inside me.
And paradise

is when the dead remember only the

beautiful things: as when, even after the war, I remembered

only the beautiful days.

Last spring my child began

to be afraid—for the first time,

too early—of death.

Flowers grow from the earth,

fear blossoms in his heart,

a fragrant smell for someone who enjoys

a fragrance like that.

And in the summer I tried to engage in politics, in the questions of my time,

an attempt that has the same fragrance

of flowers and their withering,

the attempt of a man to stage-manage and move

the furniture in his house into a new arrangement,

to participate: as in a movie theater

when someone moves his head

and asks the people in front of him to move

their heads too, just a bit,

so that he’ll have at least

a narrow path for seeing.
I tried

to go out into my time and to know, but I couldn’t get any farther

than the body of the woman beside me.

And there’s no escape.
Don’t go to the ant, thou sluggard!

It will depress you to see that blind

diligence racing around beneath the shoe that is lifted to trample.

No escape.
As in a modern chess set

which the craftsman shaped differently from the pieces you grew up with:

the king looks like a queen, the pawns are like knights,

the knights are barely horses and are as smooth as rooks.
But the game

remains with its rules.
Sometimes you long for

the traditional pieces, a king with a crown,

a castle that is round and turreted, a horse that is a horse.

The players sat inside, the talkers sat out on the balcony:

half of my belovèd, my left hand, a quarter of a friend,

a man half-dead.
The click of the massacred pieces

tossed into the wooden box

is like a distant, ominous thunder.

I am a man approaching his end.

What seems like youthful vitality in me

isn’t vitality but craziness,

because only death can put an end to this craziness.

And what seem like deep roots that I put down

are only complications on

the surface: a disease of knots, hands cramped in spasm,

tangled ropes, and demented chains.

I am a solitary man, a lonely man.
I’m not a democracy.

The executive and the loving and the judicial powers

in one body.
An eating and swilling and a vomiting power,

a hating power and a hurting power,

a blind power and a mute power.

I wasn’t elected.
I’m a political demonstration, I carry

my face above me, like a placard.
Everything is written on it.
Everything,

please, there’s no need to use tear gas,

I’m already crying.
No need to disperse me,

I’m dispersed,

and the dead too are a demonstration.

When I visit my father’s grave,

I see the tombstones lifted up by

the dust underneath:

they are a mass demonstration.

Everyone hears footsteps at night,

not just the prisoner: everyone hears.

Everything at night is footsteps,

receding or approaching, but never

coming close enough

to touch.
This is man’s mistake

about his God, and God’s mistake about man.

Oh this world, which everyone fills

to the brim.
And bitterness will come to shut

your mouth like a stubborn, resistant spring

so that it will open wide, wide, in death,

what are we, what is our life.
A child who got hurt

or was hit, as he was playing, holds back his tears

and runs to his mother, on a long road of backyards

and alleys and only beside her will he cry.

That’s how we, all our lives, hold back

our tears and run on a long road

and the tears are stifled and locked

in our throats.
And death is just a good

everlasting cry.
Ta-daaaaaa, a long blast of the shofar,

a long cry, a long silence.
Sit down.
Today.