The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (3 page)

For Hana

God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children

God has pity on kindergarten children.

He has less pity on school children.

And on grownups he has no pity at all,

he leaves them alone,

and sometimes they must crawl on all fours

in the burning sand

to reach the first-aid station

covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers

and have mercy on them and shelter them

like a tree over the old man

sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them

the last rare coins of compassion

that Mother handed down to us,

so that their happiness will protect us

now and in other days.

The U.N.
Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House in Jerusalem

The mediators, the peacemakers, the compromise-shapers, the comforters

live in the white house

and get their nourishment from far away,

through winding pipes, through dark veins, like a fetus.

And their secretaries are lipsticked and laughing,

and their sturdy chauffeurs wait below, like horses in a stable,

and the trees that shade them have their roots in no-man’s-land

and the illusions are children who went out to find cyclamen in the field

and do not come back.

And the thoughts pass overhead, restless, like reconnaissance planes,

and take photos and return and develop them

in dark sad rooms.

And I know they have very heavy chandeliers

and the boy-I-was sits on them and swings

out and back, out and back, out till there’s no coming back.

And later on, night will arrive to draw

rusty and bent conclusions from our old lives,

and over all the houses a melody will gather the scattered words

like a hand gathering crumbs upon a table

after the meal, while the talk continues

and the children are already asleep.

And hopes come to me like bold seafarers,

like the discoverers of continents coming to an island,

and stay for a day or two

and rest .
.
.

And then they set sail.

Autobiography, 1952

My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard

and I left it once, before I was finished,

and he remained there with his big, empty worry.

And my mother was like a tree on the shore

between her arms that stretched out toward me.

And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small

and in ’41 they learned to use a gun

and when I first fell in love

my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons

and the girl’s white hand held them all

by a thin string—then let them fly away.

And in ’51 the motion of my life

was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship,

and my father’s face like the headlight on the front of a train

growing smaller and smaller in the distance,

and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet,

and as I walked up my street

the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,

blood that wanted to get out in many wars

and through many openings,

that’s why it knocks against my head from the inside

and reaches my heart in angry waves.

But now, in the spring of ’52, I see

that more birds have returned than left last winter.

And I walk back down the hill to my house.

And in my room: the woman, whose body is heavy

and filled with time.

The Smell of Gasoline Ascends in My Nose

The smell of gasoline ascends in my nose.

Love, I’ll protect you and hold you close

like an
etrog
in soft wool, so carefully—

my dead father used to do it that way.

Look, the olive-tree no longer grieves—

it knows there are seasons and a man must leave,

stand by my side and dry your face now

and smile as if in a family photo.

I’ve packed my wrinkled shirts and my trouble.

I will never forget you, girl of my final

window in front of the deserts that are

empty of windows, filled with war.

You used to laugh but now you keep quiet,

the beloved country never cries out,

the wind will rustle in the dry leaves soon—

when will I sleep beside you again?

In the earth there are raw materials that, unlike us,

have not been taken out of the darkness,

the army jet makes peace in the heavens

upon us and upon all lovers in autumn.

Six Poems for Tamar

1

The rain is speaking quietly,

you can sleep now.

Near my bed, the rustle of newspaper wings.

There are no other angels.

I’ll wake up early and bribe the coming day

to be kind to us.

2

You had a laughter of grapes:

many round green laughs.

Your body is full of lizards.

All of them love the sun.

Flowers grew in the field, grass grew on my cheeks,

everything was possible.

3

You’re always lying on

my eyes.

Every day of our life together

Ecclesiastes cancels a line of his book.

We are the saving evidence in the terrible trial.

We’ll acquit them all!

4

Like the taste of blood in the mouth,

spring was upon us—suddenly.

The world is awake tonight.

It is lying on its back, with its eyes open.

The crescent moon fits the line of your cheek,

your breast fits the line of my cheek.

5

Your heart plays blood-catch

inside your veins.

Your eyes are still warm, like beds

time has slept in.

Your thighs are two sweet yesterdays,

I’m coming to you.

All hundred and fifty psalms

roar halleluyah.

6

My eyes want to flow into each other

like two neighboring lakes.

To tell each other

everything they’ve seen.

My blood has many relatives.

They never visit.

But when they die,

my blood will inherit.

Yehuda Ha-Levi

The soft hairs on the back of his neck

are the roots of his eyes.

His curly hair is

the sequel to his dreams.

His forehead: a sail; his arms: oars

to carry the soul inside his body to Jerusalem.

But in the white fist of his brain

he holds the black seeds of his happy childhood.

When he reaches the belovèd, bone-dry land—

he will sow.

Ibn Gabirol

Sometimes pus,

sometimes poetry—

always something is excreted,

always pain.

My father was a tree in a grove of fathers,

covered with green moss.

Oh widows of the flesh, orphans of the blood,

I’ve got to escape.

Eyes sharp as can-openers

pried open heavy secrets.

But through the wound in my chest

God peers into the universe.

I am the door

to his apartment.

When I Was a Child

When I was a child

grasses and masts stood at the seashore,

and as I lay there

I thought they were all the same

because all of them rose into the sky above me.

Only my mother’s words went with me

like a sandwich wrapped in rustling waxpaper,

and I didn’t know when my father would come back

because there was another forest beyond the clearing.

Everything stretched out a hand,

a bull gored the sun with its horns,

and in the nights the light of the streets caressed

my cheeks along with the walls,

and the moon, like a large pitcher, leaned over

and watered my thirsty sleep.

Look: Thoughts and Dreams

Look: thoughts and dreams are weaving over us

their warp and woof, their wide camouflage-net,

and the reconnaissance planes and God

will never know

what we really want

and where we are going.

Only the voice that rises at the end of a question

still rises above the world and hangs there,

even if it was made by

mortar shells, like a ripped flag,

like a mutilated cloud.

Look, we too are going

in the reverse-flower-way:

to begin with a calyx exulting toward the light,

to descend with the stem growing more and more solemn,

to arrive at the closed earth and to wait there for a while,

and to end as a root, in the darkness, in the deep womb.

From
We Loved Here

1

My father spent four years inside their war,

and did not hate his enemies, or love.

And yet I know that somehow, even there,

he was already forming me, out of

his calms, so few and scattered, which he gleaned

among the bombs exploding and the smoke,

and put them in his knapsack, in between

the remnants of his mother’s hardening cake.

And in his eyes he took the nameless dead,

he stored them, so that someday I might know

and love them in his glance—so that I would

not die in horror, as they all had done.
.
.
.

He filled his eyes with them, and yet in vain:

to all my wars, unwilling, I must go.

3

The lips of dead men whisper where they lie

deep down, their innocent voices hushed in earth,

and now the trees and flowers grow terribly

exaggerated, as they blossom forth.

Bandages are again torn off in haste,

the earth does not want healing, it wants pain.

And spring is not serenity, not rest,

ever, and spring is enemy terrain.

With the other lovers, we were sent to learn

about the strange land where the rainbow ends,

to see if it was possible to advance.

And we already knew: the dead return,

and we already knew: the fiercest wind

comes forth now from inside a young girl’s hand.

6

In the long nights our room was closed off and

sealed, like a grave inside a pyramid.

Above us: foreign silence, heaped like sand

for aeons at the entrance to our bed.

And when our bodies lie stretched out in sleep,

upon the walls, again, is sketched the last

appointment that our patient souls must keep.

Do you see them now?
A narrow boat drifts past;

two figures stand inside it; others row.

And stars peer out, the stars of different lives;

are carried by the Nile of time, below.

And like two mummies, we have been wrapped tight