Read The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Online
Authors: Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
Such as, give me rest.
Such as, let it all go and be gone.
Such as, come and hand me my last hour.
Such as, sorrow.
Jerusalem
On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
a kite.
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can’t see
because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they’re happy.
To make them think that we’re happy.
Before
Before the gate has been closed,
before the last question is posed,
before I am transposed.
Before the weeds fill the gardens,
before there are no more pardons,
before the concrete hardens.
Before all the flute-holes are covered,
before things are locked in the cupboard,
before the rules are discovered.
Before the conclusion is planned,
before God closes his hand,
before we have nowhere to stand.
And as Far as Abu Ghosh
And as far as Abu Ghosh we were silent
and as far as old age I will love you
at the foot of the hill of horrors,
in the den of the winds.
And in Sha’ar Ha-Gai
the angels of the three religions stepped down into
the road.
Faith in one god is still heavy.
And with words
of pain I must describe the fig trees
and what happened to me, which wasn’t my fault.
Sand
was blown into my eyes and became tears.
And in Ramla
small planes were parked, and large nameless dead.
The scent
of orange groves touched my blood.
My blood looked
over its shoulder to see who touched.
Winds, like actors, began
to put on their costumes again so that they could act before us,
their masks of house and mountain and woods,
makeup of sunset and night.
From there the other roads began.
And my heart was covered with dreams, like my shiny
shoes, which were covered with dust.
For dreams too are a long road
whose end I will never reach.
You Too Got Tired
You too got tired of being an advertisement
for our world, so that angels could see: yes it’s pretty, earth.
Relax.
Take a rest from smiling.
And without complaint
allow the sea-breeze to lift the corners of your mouth.
You won’t object; your eyes too, like flying paper,
are flying.
The fruit has fallen from the sycamore tree.
How do you say
to love
in the dialect of water?
In the language of earth, what part of speech are we?
Here is the street.
What sense does it finally make:
any mound, a last wind.
What prophet would sing.
.
.
.
And at night, from out of my sleep, you begin to talk.
And how shall I answer you.
And what shall I bring.
The Place Where We Are Right
From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.
But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.
Mayor
It’s sad to be
the mayor of Jerusalem—
it’s terrible.
How can a man be mayor of such a city?
What can he do with it?
Build and build and build.
And at night the stones of the mountains crawl down
and surround the stone houses,
like wolves coming to howl at the dogs,
who have become the slaves of men.
Resurrection
Afterward they will get up
all together, and with a sound of chairs scraping
they will face the narrow exit.
And their clothes are crumpled
and covered with dust and cigarette ashes
and their hand discovers in the inside pocket
a ticket stub from a very previous season.
And their faces are still crisscrossed
with God’s will.
And their eyes are red from so much sleeplessness
under the ground.
And right away, questions:
What time is it?
Where did you put mine?
When?
When?
And one of them can be seen in an ancient
scanning of the sky, to see if rain.
Or a woman,
with an age-old gesture, wipes her eyes
and lifts the heavy hair
at the back of her neck.
From
Summer or Its End
You washed the fruit.
You murdered the bacteria.
On the chair: a watch and a dress.
In the bed: us,
without any of these
and each for the other.
And if it weren’t for our names
we would have been completely naked.
It was marvelous, the dream on
the table.
We left the fruit
forever till the next day.
And one of these evenings
I’ll have a lot to say about
everything that remains and is kept inside us.
After midnight, when our words began
to influence the world,
I put my hand on your forehead:
your thoughts were smaller than the palm of my hand,
but I knew this was a mistake,
like the mistake of the hand that covers
the sun.
Last to dry was the hair.
When we were already far from the sea,
when words and salt, which had merged on us,
separated from one another with a sigh,
and your body no longer showed
signs of a terrible ancientness.
And in vain we had forgotten a few things on the beach,
so that we would have an excuse to return.
We didn’t return.
And these days I remember the days
that have your name on them, like a name on a ship,
and how we saw through two open doors
one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds
with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers,
who waited for rain,
and how at night, when the world cooled off,
your body kept its warmth for a long time,
like the sea.
Like the imprint of our bodies,
not a sign will remain that we were here.
The world closes behind us,
the sand is smoothed out again.
And already on the calendar there are dates
you will no longer exist in,
already a wind bringing clouds
that won’t rain on us.
And your name is on the passenger list of
ships and in the guest books
of hotels whose very names
deaden the heart.
The three languages that I know,
all the colors that I see and dream,
won’t help me.
If with a bitter mouth you speak
sweet words, the world will not grow sweet
and will not grow bitter.
And it is written in the book that we shall not fear.
And it is written that we too shall change,
like the words,
in future and in past,
in plural and in loneliness.
And soon, in the coming nights,
we will appear, like wandering actors,
each in the other’s dream
and in the dreams of strangers whom we didn’t know together.
In the Full Severity of Mercy
Count them.
You are able to count them.
They
are not like the sand on the seashore.
They
are not innumerable like the stars.
They are like lonely people.
On the corner or in the street.
Count them.
See them
seeing the sky through ruined houses.
Go out through the stones and come back.
What
will you come back to?
But count them, for they
do their time in dreams
and they walk around outside and their hopes are unbandaged
and gaping, and they will die of them.
Count them.