Three Poems
Amichai, Yehuda
yehuda amChai Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel's leading poets, is the author of several volumes of poetry including Not of This Time, Not of This Place; Songs of Jerusalem; Myself and Amen. The...
...Half the people in the world Half the people in the world love the other half, half the people hate the other half...
...And how people who had gone forth whole are brought back to their homes, in the evening, like small change...
...A reference to a well-known song which concludes the Passover Haggadah...
...Copyright «79S0 by T. Carmi...
...Out of three or four in a room Out of three or four in a room, there is always one who stands at the window...
...Behind him the words...
...Out of three or four in a room, there is always one who stands at the window...
...His dark hair over his thoughts...
...The last stanza reads: Then came the Holy One, blessed be He, and destroyed the angel of death, that slew the butcher, that killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burned the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that father had bought for two zuzim.' [My father] My father took part in their war for four years, and he didn't hate his enemies or love them...
...They are printed with the kind permission of Viking Press and Penguin Books...
...And through what crack shall I see the white housing-projects of my dreams, and the barefoot runners on the sands or, at least, the fluttering of the girl's handkerchief, by the hill...
...The poems which appear here (as well as the poetry and accompanying notes in moment's September issue) are taken from the forthcoming Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited by T. Carmi...
...And where is my place between these halves that are so well matched...
...And set forth on the roads made only for returning, and go through all the terrifying stations— cat, stick, fire, water, butcher—between the kid and the angel of death?* Half the people love, half the people hate...
...Compelled to see the injustice between the thorns and the fire on the hill...
...But I know that already there, day after day, he was forming me out of his few—so very few— tranquillities, which he scraped up between bombs and smoke, then put them in his tattered pack, together with the scraps of his mother's hardening cake...
...And in his eyes he gathered the nameless dead, a great many dead he gathered for my sake, that I might recognize them in his look and love them and not die, as they did, in such horror...
...Must I, because of those and the others, go and wander and endlessly change, like rain in its cycle, and sleep among rocks, and be rugged like the trunks of olive-trees, and hear the moon bark at me, and camouflage my love with worries, and grow like the timorous grass in between railway tracks, and live in the ground like a mole, and be with roots and not with branches, and not rest my cheek upon the cheek of angels, and make love in the first cave, and marry my wife under the canopy of beams which support the earth, and act out my death, always to the last breath and the last words, without ever understanding, and put flag-poles on top of my house and a shelter at the bottom...
...And before him, voices that are straying without packs, hearts without provisions, proplitfies without water and large stones which were returned and remained sealed like letters with no address and no one to receive them...
...He filled his eyes with them, and he was mistaken: I must go out to all my wars...
Vol. 5 • October 1980 • No. 9
