Read Online The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell - Free Book Online

learning short as a single heartbeat. All of it.
    15
    I and Jerusalem are like a blind man and a cripple.
    She sees for me
    out to the Dead Sea, to the End of Days.
    And I hoist her up on my shoulders
    and walk blind in my darkness underneath.
    16
    On this bright autumn day
    I establish Jerusalem once again.
    The foundation scrolls
    are flying in the air, birds, thoughts.
    God is angry with me
    because I always force him
    to create the world once again
    from chaos, light, second day, until
    man, and back to the beginning.
    17
    In the morning the shadow of the Old City falls
    on the New. In the afternoon—vice versa.
    Nobody profits. The muezzin’s prayer
    is wasted on the new houses. The ringing
    bells roll like balls and bounce back.
    The shout of Holy, Holy, Holy from the synagogues will fade
    like gray smoke.
    At the end of summer I breathe this air
    that is burnt and pained. My thoughts have
    the stillness of many closed books:
    many crowded books, with most of their pages
    stuck together like eyelids in the morning.
    18
    I climb up the Tower of David
    a little higher than the prayer that ascends the highest:
    halfway to heaven. A few of
    the ancients succeeded: Mohammed, Jesus,
    and others. Though they didn’t find rest in heaven;
    they just entered a higher excitement. But
    the applause for them hasn’t stopped ever since,
    down below.
    19
    Jerusalem is built on the vaulted foundations
    of a held-back scream. If there were no reason
    for the scream, the foundations would crumble, the city would collapse;
    if the scream were screamed, Jerusalem would explode into the heavens.
    20
    Poets come in the evening into the Old City
    and they emerge from it pockets stuffed with images
    and metaphors and little well-constructed parables
    and crepuscular similes from among columns and crypts,
    from within darkening fruit
    and delicate filigree of hammered hearts.
    I lifted my hand to my forehead
    to wipe off the sweat
    and found I had accidentally raised up
    the ghost of Else Lasker-Schüler.
    Light and tiny as she was
    in her life, all the more so in her death. Ah, but
    her poems.
    21
    Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.
    The Temple Mount is a huge ship, a magnificent
    luxury liner. From the portholes of her Western Wall
    cheerful saints look out, travelers. Hasidim on the pier
    wave goodbye, shout hooray, hooray, bon voyage! She is
    always arriving, always sailing away. And the fences and the piers
    and the policemen and the flags and the high masts of churches
    and mosques and the smokestacks of synagogues and the boats
    of psalms of praise and the mountain-waves. The shofar blows: another one
    has just left. Yom Kippur sailors in white uniforms
    climb among ladders and ropes of well-tested prayers.
    And the commerce and the gates and the golden domes:
    Jerusalem is the Venice of God.
    22
    Jerusalem is Sodom’s sister-city,
    but the merciful salt didn’t have mercy on her
    and didn’t cover her with a silent whiteness.
    Jerusalem is an unconsenting Pompeii.
    History books that were thrown into the fire,
    their pages are strewn about, stiffening in red.
    An eye whose color is too light, blind,
    always shattered in a sieve of veins.
    Many births gaping below,
    a womb with numberless teeth,
    a double-edged woman and the holy beasts.
    The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea
    and set in her: a terrible mistake.
    Sky fish were caught in a net of alleys,
    tearing one another to pieces.
    Jerusalem. An operation that was left open.
    The surgeons went to take a nap in faraway skies,
    but her dead gradually
    formed a circle, all around her,
    like quiet petals.
    My God.
    My stamen.
    Amen.

    The Bull Returns
    The bull returns from his day of work in the ring
    after a cup of coffee with his opponents,
    having left them a note with his address and
    the exact location of the red scarf.
    The sword remains in his stiff-necked neck.
    And when he’s usually at home. Now
    he sits on his bed, with his heavy
    Jewish eyes. He