The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (23 page)

and already our voices were like loudspeakers,

announcing times and places.

From your leather bag with its soft folds, like an old woman’s cheeks,

you took out lipstick, a passport, and a letter sharp-edged as a knife,

and put them on the table.

Then you put everything away again.

I said, I’ll move back a little, as at an exhibition,

to see the whole picture.
And

I haven’t stopped moving back.

Time is as light as froth,

the heavy sediment stays in us forever.

A Child Is Something Else Again

A child is something else again.
Wakes up

in the afternoon and in an instant he’s full of words,

in an instant he’s humming, in an instant warm,

instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job.
They’ve already placed their bets on him

but he doesn’t know it.
He scratches his body

for pleasure.
Nothing hurts yet.

They’re training him to be a polite Job,

to say “Thank you” when the Lord has given,

to say “You’re welcome” when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.

A child is a missile into the coming generations.

I launched him: I’m still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day

glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,

kissing him in his sleep,

hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.

A child delivers you from death.

Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

When I Have a Stomachache

When I have a stomachache, I feel like

the whole round globe.

When I have a headache, laughter

bursts out in the wrong place in my body.

And when I cry, they’re putting my father in the ground

in a grave that’s too big for him, and he won’t

grow to fit it.

And if I’m a hedgehog, I’m a hedgehog in reverse,

the spikes grow inward and stab.

And if I’m the prophet Ezekiel, I see

in the Vision of the Chariot

only the dung-spattered feet of oxen and the muddy wheels.

I’m like a porter carrying a heavy armchair

on his back to some faraway place

without knowing he can put it down and sit in it.

I’m like a rifle that’s a little out of date

but very accurate: when I love,

there’s a strong recoil, back to childhood, and it hurts.

I Feel Just Fine in My Pants

If the Romans hadn’t boasted about their victory

on the Arch of Titus, we wouldn’t know

the shape of the Menorah in the Temple.

But the shape of the Jews we know because

they begat and begat, right up until me.

I feel just fine in my pants

in which my victory is hidden.

Even though I know I’m going to die,

and even though I know the Messiah won’t come,

I feel just fine.

I’m made out of remnants of flesh and blood, scraps

of all sorts of Weltanschauung.
I’m the generation that’s

the pot-bottom: sometimes at night

when I can’t sleep,

I hear the hard spoon scratching,

scraping at the bottom of the pot.

Still, I feel fine in my pants,

I feel just fine.

Jerusalem Is Full of Used Jews

Jerusalem is full of used Jews, worn out by history,

Jews secondhand, slightly damaged, at bargain prices.

And the eye yearns toward Zion
all the time.
And all the eyes

of the living and the dead are cracked like eggs

on the rim of the bowl, to make the city

puff up rich and fat.

Jerusalem is full of tired Jews,

always goaded on again for holidays, for memorial days,

like circus bears dancing on aching legs.

What does Jerusalem need?
It doesn’t need a mayor,

it needs a ringmaster, whip in hand,

who can tame prophecies, train prophets to gallop

around and around in a circle, teach its stones to line up

in a bold, risky formation for the grand finale.

Later they’ll jump back down again

to the sound of applause and wars.

And the eye yearns toward Zion, and weeps.

Ecology of Jerusalem

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

like the air over industrial cities.

It’s hard to breathe.

And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives

and the houses and towers are its packing materials.

Later these are discarded and piled up in dumps.

And sometimes candles arrive instead of people,

and then it’s quiet.

And sometimes people come instead of candles,

and then there’s noise.

And in enclosed gardens heavy with jasmine

foreign consulates,

like wicked brides that have been rejected,

lie in wait for their moment.

In the Old City

We are holiday weepers, engraving our names on every stone,

infected by hope, hostages of governments and history,

blown by the wind, vacuuming holy dust,

our king is a young child, weeping and beautiful,

his picture hangs everywhere.

These stairs always force us to bob

up and down, as if in a merry dance,

even those of us who are heavy-hearted.

But the divine couple sit on the terrace of the coffee shop:

he has a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,

she has long hair.
They are at peace now

after the offering of halvah and honey and hashish smoke,

both dressed in long transparent gowns

without underclothes.

When they rise from their resting place opposite the sun

as it sets on Jaffa Gate,

everyone stands up to gaze at them.

Two white auras surround their dark bodies.

Tourists

1

So condolence visits is what they’re here for,

sitting around at the Holocaust Memorial, putting on a serious face

at the Wailing Wall,

laughing behind heavy curtains in hotel rooms.

They get themselves photographed with the important dead

at Rachel’s Tomb and Herzl’s Tomb, and up on Ammunition Hill.

They weep at the beautiful prowess of our boys,

lust after our tough girls

and hang up their underwear

to dry quickly

in cool blue bathrooms.

2

Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David’s Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me.
A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference.
“You see that man over there with the baskets?
A little to the right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period.
A little to the right of his head.”
“But he’s moving, he’s moving!”
I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, “Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period?
It doesn’t matter, but near it, a little to the
left and then down a bit, there’s a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”

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 mountain I am searching

for my little boy.

An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father

both in their temporary failure.

Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool

in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants

the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels

of the terrible
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 a son

has always been the beginning

of a new religion in these mountains.

A Song of Lies on Sabbath Eve

On a Sabbath eve, at dusk on a summer day

when I was a child,

when the odors of food and prayer drifted up from all the houses

and the wings of the Sabbath angels rustled in the air,

I began to lie to my father:

“I went to another synagogue.”

I don’t know if he believed me or not

but the lie was very sweet in my mouth.

And in all the houses at night

hymns and lies drifted up together,

O taste and see,

and in all the houses at night

Sabbath angels died like flies in the lamp,

and lovers put mouth to mouth

and inflated one another till they floated in the air

or burst.

Since then, lying has tasted very sweet to me,

and since then I’ve always gone to another synagogue.

And my father returned the lie when he died:

“I’ve gone to another life.”

The Parents Left the Child

The parents left the child with his grandparents,

tears and pleading didn’t help him one bit,

they went off to their pleasures at the blue sea.

The grandparents’ tears have been in their safekeeping

since before the Holocaust,

sweet vintages of weeping.

The child’s weeping is still new and salty,

like his parents’ sea of pleasures.

He is soon himself again: despite the strict prohibition

he sits on the floor arranging all the knives

in a meticulous order, by size and type:

the sharp, the serrated, the long—a pain for everything

and a knife for every pain.

In the evening the parents come back

when he’s fast asleep in his deep bed.

He has already begun to stew in his own life

and no one knows what the cooking will do to him.

Will he be soft or get harder

and harder, like an egg?

That’s the way cooking works.

Love Is Finished Again

Love is finished again, like a profitable citrus season

or like an archaeological dig that turned up

from deep inside the earth

turbulent things that wanted to be forgotten.

Love is finished again.
When a tall building

is torn down and the debris cleared away, you stand there

on the square empty lot, saying: What a small

space that building stood on

with all its many floors and people.

From the distant valleys you can hear

the sound of a solitary tractor at work

and from the distant past, the sound of a fork

clattering against a porcelain plate,

beating an egg yolk with sugar for a child,

clattering and clattering.

End of Summer in the Judean Mountains

End of summer in the Judean mountains.
The ground lies there

as last year’s rains left it.
The rifle range on the slope

is silent now, riddled targets were left behind

like human beings.
An old man cries out with a gaping mouth

about the loss of land and flesh, and his young grandson