The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Page 15
and on the one who says it and stays; or a single thought
wanders through cities and villages and many countries
in the head of a man who is traveling.
All these make a strange
dance rhythm. But I don’t know who’s dancing to it
or who’s calling the tune.
A while back, I found an old photo of myself
with a little girl who died long ago.
We were sitting together, hugging as children do,
in front of a wall where a pear tree stood: her one hand
on my shoulder, and the other one free, reaching out from the dead
to me, now.
And I knew that the hope of the dead is their past,
and God has taken it.
In the Morning It Was Still Night
In the morning it was still night and the lights were on
when we rose from happiness like people
who rise from the dead,
and like them in an instant each of us remembered
a former life. That’s why we separated.
You put on an old-fashioned blouse of striped silk
and a tight skirt, a stewardess of goodbyes
from some earlier generation,
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
puts his head down on the old man’s knees
and doesn’t understand.
Beyond them, some pretty girls are sitting on a rock
like severe lawyers
to defend the summer and administer its estate.
And a bit farther, near a dark cave there’s a fig tree,
that brothel where ripe figs
couple with wasps and are split to death.
There is laughter that isn’t burnt, weeping that isn’t dried out,
and a deep stillness everywhere.
But a great love begins here, sometimes,
with the sound of dry branches snapping in the dead forest.
Relativity
There are toy ships with waves painted on them
and dresses with a print of ships at sea.
There’s the effort of remembering and the effort of blossoming,
the ease of love and the ease of death.
A four-year-old dog corresponds to a man of thirty-five
and a one-day fly, at twilight, to a ripe old man
full of memories. Three hours of thought equal
two minutes of laughter.
In a game, a crying child gives away his hiding-place
but a silent child will be forgotten.
It’s a long time since black stopped being the color of mourning:
a young girl defiantly squeezes herself
into a black bikini.
A painting of a volcano on the wall
makes the people in the room feel secure,
and a cemetery is soothing
because of all the dead.
Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai because
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.
Poem Without an End
Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum
A Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers
The people in the painfully bright auditorium
spoke about religion
in the life of contemporary man
and about God’s place in it.
People spoke in excited voices
as they do at airports.
I walked away from them:
I opened an iron door marked “Emergency”
and entered into
a great tranquillity: Questions and Answers.
1924<
br />
I was born in 1924. If I were a violin my age
I wouldn’t be one of the best. As a wine I’d be first-rate
or I’d be vinegar. As a dog I’d be dead. As a book
I’d just be getting expensive, or be thrown away by now.
As a forest I’d be young; as a machine, ridiculous.
As a human being, I’m tired, very tired.
I was born in 1924. When I think about human beings,
I see only those who were born the same year as I,
whose mothers lay in labor with mine
wherever they were, in hospitals or dark houses.
Today, on my birthday, I would like to say
a solemn prayer for you
whose lives are already pulled down by the weight
of hopes and disappointments,
whose deeds grow smaller, and whose gods multiply—
you are all brothers of my hope, companions
of my despair.
May you find lasting peace,
the living in their lives, the dead
in being dead.
And whoever remembers his childhood best
is the winner,
if there are any winners.
Half-Sized Violin
I sat in the playground where I played as a child.
The child went on playing in the sand. His hands went on
making pat-pat, then dig then destroy,
then pat-pat again.
Between the trees that little house is still standing
where the high-voltage hums and threatens.
On the iron door a skull-and-crossbones: another
old childhood acquaintance.
When I was nine they gave me
a half-sized violin and half-sized feelings.
Sometimes I’m still overcome by pride
and a great joy: I already know
how to dress and undress
all by myself.
A Pace Like That
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I’d need a different pace, a slower one,
to observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
but the way a child learns to read,
or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
on an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do