The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (8 page)

Too soon they learned to read the terrible

writing on the wall.
To read and write on

other walls.
And the feast continues in silence.

Count them.
Be present, for they

have already used up all the blood and there’s still not enough,

as in a dangerous operation, when one

is exhausted and beaten like ten thousand.
For who is

the judge, and what is the judgment,

unless it be in the full sense of the night

and in the full severity of mercy.

Too Many

Too many olive trees in the valley,

too many stones on the slope.

Too many dead, too little

earth to cover them all.

And I must return to the landscapes painted

on the bank notes

and to my father’s face on the coins.

Too many memorial days, too little

remembering.
My friends have

forgotten what they learned when they were young.

And my girlfriend lies in a hidden place

and I am always outside, food for hungry winds.

Too much weariness, too few eyes

to contain it.
Too many clocks,

too little time.
Too many oaths

on the Bible, too many highways, too few

ways where we can truly go: each to his destiny.

Too many hopes

that ran away from their masters.

Too many dreamers.
Too few dreams

whose interpretation would change the history of the world

like Pharaoh’s dreams.

My life closes behind me.
And I am outside, a dog

for the cruel, blind wind that always

pushes at my back.
I am well trained: I rise and sit

and wait to lead it through the streets

of my life, which could have been my true life.

Poem for Arbor Day

Children are planting their shoots

that will become the forest

they’ll get lost in, terribly, when they grow up.

And they count with numbers

that will shatter their whole nights

to make them illuminated and outside,

sleepless, yearless.

The almond tree is in bloom

and it smells the smell of

humans as they walk

in the sweat of the fear of their living

for the first time.

And their voice will carry their joy, like a porter who carries

an expensive chair, not his, to the strange house,

and puts it down there in the rooms

and leaves, alone.

Jacob and the Angel

Just before dawn she sighed and held him

that way, and defeated him.

And he held her that way, and defeated her,

and both of them knew that a hold

brings death.

They agreed to do without names.

But in the first light

he saw her body,

which remained white in the places

the swimsuit had covered, yesterday.

Then someone called her suddenly from above,

twice.

The way you call a little girl from playing

in the yard.

And he knew her name; and let her go.

Here

Here, underneath the kites that the children are flying

and the ones the telephone lines snatched last year, I stand

with the strong branches of my quiet decisions that have

long since grown from me and the birds of the small hesitation

in my heart and the boulders of the huge hesitation at my feet

and my two twin eyes, one of which is always

busy and the other always in love.
And my gray pants

and my green sweater, and my face absorbing colors

and reflecting colors; and I don’t know what else

I return and receive and project and reject

and how I was a market for many things.

Import-export.
Border checkpoint.
Crossroads.

Division of waters, of the dead.
The meeting-place.
The parting-place.

And the wind comes through a treetop and lingers

in every leaf; but still,

how it passes without stopping

while we come and stay a little and then fall.

And as between sisters, there is much resemblance between us and the world:

thighs and mountainside.
A distant thought

looks like the deed that grew here in the flesh and on the mountain,

looks like the cypresses that happened, dark, in the mountain range.

The circle closes.
I am its buckle.

And before I discovered that my hard fathers

are soft on the inside, they died.

And all the generations that came before me are many acrobats

mounted on one another in the circus,

and usually I am the one on the bottom

while all of them, a heavy load, stand on my shoulders,

and sometimes I am on the top: one hand lifted

to the roof; and the applause in the arena below

is my flesh and my reward.

Elegy on an Abandoned Village

1

The wine of August was spilled on the face of the girl, but

the destruction was sober.
Thick wooden beams stuck out

from the life of forgotten people; and a distant love

hurled itself, echoing like thunder, into the ravine.

And slowly the valleys rose to the mountain, in the midday

hours, and we were almost sad.
And like some stranger

in a strange city, who reads in a book of addresses and names,

I stand and choose a hotel, temporary: here.

2

The enormous snow was set down far away.
Sometimes

I must use my love as the only way to describe it,

and must hire the wind to demonstrate the wailing of women.

It’s hard for stones that roll from season to season

to remember the dreamers and the whisperers in the grass,

who fell in their love.
And like a man who keeps shaking

his wrist when his watch stops: Who is shaking us?
Who?

3

The wind brought voices from far away, like an infant

in her arms.
The wind never stops.
There, standing,

are the power-plants that discovered our weakness when

we needed to appear strong, needed to make

a decision in the dark, without a mirror or a light.

Thoughts have dropped and fly parallel to the ground, like birds.

And beside the sea: picnickers sit among friends.

Their money was brought from far away; their portrait is seen

on crumpling paper.
In their laughter: blossoming clouds.

Our heart beats in the footsteps that watchmen take, back and forth.

And if someone should love us, surely the distant snow

will realize it, a long time before we do.

4

The rest is not simply silence.
The rest is a screech.

Like a car shifting gears on a dangerous uphill road.

Have you listened closely enough to the calls of the children

at play in the ruined houses, when their voices stop

short, as they reach the ceiling, out of habit, and later

burst up to the sky?
Oh night without a Jerusalem,

oh children in the ruins, who will never again be birds,

oh passing time, when newspapers that have yellowed already

interest you again: like a document.
And the face of last year’s

woman lights up in the memory of a distant man.

But the wind keeps forgetting.
Because it is always there.

Should I wait here for God’s voice, or for the scream of a train

between the hard-pressing hills?
Look, children and birds

were closed and opened, each into song and muteness.

Or girls on their long road: look as again they turn into

fig trees; how wonderful they are for love.
And the thunder

of sparrows as they rise from the garbage; see what is written

on stones.
You weren’t the one who wrote it.
And yet

it is always your handwriting.
Stay for a while, in the narrow

place between earth and its short god.
Listen as the tin

gradually matures in its rust, and the voice of alleys

changes too late: not till death has arrived.

For only in the half-destroyed do we understand

the blue that covers the inside of rooms, like doctors

who learn by the bodies gaping in front of them.
But we

will never know how blood behaves when it’s inside,

within the whole body, when the heart shines into it, from

far away, in its dark path.
And girls are still

hidden among the fresh laundry hanging in the air

that also will turn into rain among the mountains

sent to scout and uncover the nakedness of the land;

and uncovered it; and stayed in the valleys, forever.

The Elegy on the Lost Child

I can see by their mark how high the waters reached

last winter; but how can I know what level

love reached inside me?
And perhaps it overflowed my banks.

For what remained in the wadi?—just congealed mud.

What remained on my face?—not even a thin white line,

as above the lips of the child who was drinking milk

and put down the glass, with a click, on the kitchen table.

What remained?
Perhaps a leaf in the small

stone that was placed on the windowsill, to watch over us

like an angel when we were inside.
And to love means not

to remain; means not to leave a trace, but to change

utterly.
To be forgotten.
And to understand means to bloom.

Spring understands.
To remember the belovèd means to

forget the many belongings that piled up.

Loving means having to forget the other love,

closing the other doors.
Look, we saved a seat,

we put down a coat or a book on the empty chair

next to us, perhaps empty forever.
And how long

could we keep it for ourselves?
After all, someone will come,

a stranger will sit beside you.
And you turn around,

impatient, to the door with the red sign over it, you look

at your watch; that too is a habit of prayer, like bowing

and kissing.
And outside they always invent new thoughts

and these too are placed on the tired faces of people,

like colored lights in the street.
Or look at the child, whose

thoughts are painted upon him like a pattern upon

an ancient urn, for others to see, he still isn’t

thinking them for himself.
The earth wanders, passes

beneath the soles of our shoes, like a moving stage,

like your face which I thought was mine and wasn’t.
But the child

got lost.
The last scion of his games, the Benjamin

of colored paper, the grandson of his ancient hiding-places.

He came and went in the ringing of his toys among

empty wells, at the ends of holidays and within