The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (4 page)

in love.
And after centuries, dawn arrives;

a cheerful archaeologist—with the light.

18

A preface first: the two of them, the brittle

calm, necessity, and sun, and shade,

an anxious father, cities braced for battle,

and from afar, unrecognizable dead.

The story’s climax now—the war.
First leave,

and smoke instead of streets, and he and she

together, and a mother from her grave

comforting: It’ll be all right, don’t worry.

And the last laugh is this: the way she put

his army cap on, walking to the mirror.

And was so lovely, and the cap just fit.

And then, behind the houses, in the yard,

a separation like cold-blooded murder,

and night arriving, like an afterword.

God’s Hand in the World

1

God’s hand is in the world

like my mother’s hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken

on Sabbath eve.

What does God see through the window

while his hands reach into the world?

What does my mother see?

2

My pain is already a grandfather:

it has begotten two generations

of pains that look like it.

My hopes have erected white housing projects

far away from the crowds inside me.

My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk

like a bicycle.
All night outside, in the dew.

Children mark the eras of my life

and the eras of Jerusalem

with moon chalk on the street.

God’s hand in the world.

Sort of an Apocalypse

The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine:

“Tonight they definitely might come.
Assign

positions, armor-plate the leaves, secure the tree,

tell the dead to report home immediately.”

The white lamb leaned over, said to the wolf:

“Humans are bleating and my heart aches with grief.

I’m afraid they’ll get to gunpoint, to bayonets in the dust.

At our next meeting this matter will be discussed.”

All the nations (united) will flow to Jerusalem

to see if the Torah has gone out.
And then,

inasmuch as it’s spring, they’ll come down

and pick flowers from all around.

And they’ll beat swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords,

and so on and so on, and back and forth.

Perhaps from being beaten thinner and thinner,

the iron of hatred will vanish, forever.

And That Is Your Glory

(Phrase from the liturgy of the Days of Awe)

I’ve yoked together my large silence and my small outcry

like an ox and an ass.
I’ve been through low and through high.

I’ve been in Jerusalem, in Rome.
And perhaps in Mecca anon.

But now God is hiding, and man cries Where have you gone.

And that is your glory.

Underneath the world, God lies stretched on his back,

always repairing, always things get out of whack.

I wanted to see him all, but I see no more

than the soles of his shoes and I’m sadder than I was before.

And that is his glory.

Even the trees went out once to choose a king.

A thousand times I’ve given my life one more fling.

At the end of the street somebody stands and picks:

this one and this one and this one and this one and this.

And that is your glory.

Perhaps like an ancient statue that has no arms

our life, without deeds and heroes, has greater charms.

Ungird my T-shirt, love; this was my final bout.

I fought all the knights, until the electricity gave out.

And that is my glory.

Rest your mind, it ran with me all the way,

it’s exhausted now and needs to knock off for the day.

I see you standing by the wide-open fridge door, revealed

from head to toe in a light from another world.

And that is my glory

and that is his glory

and that is your glory.

Of Three or Four in a Room

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window.

He must see the evil among thorns

and the fires on the hill.

And how people who went out of their houses whole

are given back in the evening like small change.

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window,

his dark hair above his thoughts.

Behind him, words.

And in front of him, voices wandering without a knapsack,

hearts without provisions, prophecies without water,

large stones that have been returned

and stay sealed, like letters that have no

address and no one to receive them.

Not Like a Cypress

Not like a cypress,

not all at once, not all of me,

but like the grass, in thousands of cautious green exits,

to be hiding like many children

while one of them seeks.

And not like the single man,

like Saul, whom the multitude found

and made king.

But like the rain in many places

from many clouds, to be absorbed, to be drunk

by many mouths, to be breathed in

like the air all year long

and scattered like blossoming in springtime.

Not the sharp ring that wakes up

the doctor on call,

but with tapping, on many small windows

at side entrances, with many heartbeats.

And afterward the quiet exit, like smoke

without shofar-blasts, a statesman resigning,

children tired from play,

a stone as it almost stops rolling

down the steep hill, in the place

where the plain of great renunciation begins,

from which, like prayers that are answered,

dust rises in many myriads of grains.

Through Two Points Only One Straight Line Can Pass

(Theorem in geometry)

A planet once got married to a star,

and inside, voices talked of future war.

I only know what I was told in class:

through two points only one straight line can pass.

A stray dog chased us down an empty street.

I threw a stone; the dog would not retreat.

The king of Babel stooped to eating grass.

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

Your small sob is enough for many pains,

as locomotive-power can pull long trains.

When will we step inside the looking-glass?

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

At times
I
stands apart, at times it rhymes

with
you,
at times
we
’s singular, at times

plural, at times I don’t know what.
Alas,

through two points only one straight line can pass.

Our life of joy turns to a life of tears,

our life eternal to a life of years.

Our life of gold became a life of brass.

Through two points only one straight line can pass.

Half the People in the World

Half the people in the world

love the other half,

half the people

hate the other half.

Must I because of this half and that half

go wandering and changing ceaselessly

like rain in its cycle,

must I sleep among rocks,

and grow rugged like the trunks of olive trees,

and hear the moon barking at me,

and camouflage my love with worries,

and sprout like frightened grass between the railroad tracks,

and live underground like a mole,

and remain with roots and not with branches,

and not feel my cheek against the cheek of angels,

and love in the first cave,

and marry my wife beneath a canopy

of beams that support the earth,

and act out my death, always

till the last breath and the last

words and without ever understanding,

and put flagpoles on top of my house

and a bomb shelter underneath.
And go out on roads

made only for returning and go through

all the appalling stations—

cat, stick, fire, water, butcher,

between the kid and the angel of death?

Half the people love,

half the people hate.

And where is my place between such well-matched halves,

and through what crack will I see

the white housing projects of my dreams

and the barefoot runners on the sands

or, at least, the waving

of a girl’s kerchief, beside the mound?

For My Birthday

Thirty-two times I went out into my life,

each time causing less pain to my mother,

less to other people,

more to myself.

Thirty-two times I have put on the world

and still it doesn’t fit me.

It weighs me down,

unlike the coat that now takes the shape of my body

and is comfortable

and will gradually wear out.

Thirty-two times I went over the account

without finding the mistake,

began the story

but wasn’t allowed to finish it.

Thirty-two years I’ve been carrying along with me

my father’s traits

and most of them I’ve dropped along the way,

so I could ease the burden.

And weeds grow in my mouth.
And I wonder,

and the beam in my eyes, which I won’t be able to remove,

has started to blossom with the trees in springtime.

And my good deeds grow smaller

and smaller.
But

the interpretations around them have grown huge, as in

an obscure passage of the Talmud

where the text takes up less and less of the page

and Rashi and the other commentators

close in on it from every side.

And now, after thirty-two times,

I am still a parable

with no chance to become its meaning.

And I stand without camouflage before the enemy’s eyes,

with outdated maps in my hand,

in the resistance that is gathering strength and between towers,

and alone, without recommendations

in the vast desert.

Two Photographs

1.
Uncle David

When Uncle David fell in the First World War,

the high Carpathians buried him in snow.

And just as buried: his hard questions.
So

I never found out what the answers were.

But somehow the brass buttons on his coat

opened for me.
My life began far from

the pure white of his death, and like a gate

his face swung open, and because of him

I live my answer, as a part of all

that did survive, after the deep snow fell.

And he, still posing sadly as before,