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

knows
    that the sword too is hurt when it pierces flesh.
    In his next incarnation he’ll be a sword: the hurt will remain.
    (“The door is open. If not, the key is under
    the mat.”)
    He knows about the mercy of twilight and about the final
    mercy. In the Bible, he’s listed with the clean animals.
    He’s very kosher: chews his cud,
    and even his heart is divided and cloven like a hoof.
    From his chest, hairs burst forth
    dry and gray, as though from a split mattress.

    A Luxury
    My uncle is buried at Sheikh Badr, my other uncle
    is scattered in the Carpathians, my father is buried in Sanhedria,
    my grandmother on the Mount of Olives, and all their forefathers
    are buried in a half-destroyed Jewish graveyard
    among the villages of Lower Franconia,
    near rivers and forests that are not Jerusalem.
    Grandfather, Grandfather, who converted heavy-eyed cows
    in his barn underneath the kitchen and got up at four in the morning.
    I inherited this earliness from him. With a mouth
    bitter from nightmares, I go out to feed my bad dreams.
    Grandfather, Grandfather, chief rabbi of my life,
    sell my pains the way you used to sell
    khametz on Passover eve: so that they stay in me and even go on hurting
    but won’t be mine. Won’t belong to me.
    So many tombstones are scattered in the past of my life,
    engraved names like the names of stations
    where the train doesn’t stop any more.
    How will I cover all the distances on my own routes,
    how will I make connections among them all? I can’t afford
    to maintain such an expensive railway system. It’s a luxury.

    To Bake the Bread of Yearning
    The last time I went to see my child
    he was still eating pablum. Now, sadly,
    bread and meat, with knife and fork,
    with manners that are already preparing him
    to die quietly, politely.
    He thinks I’m a sailor, knows I don’t have a ship
    or a sea; only great distances and winds.
    The movements of my father’s body in prayer
    and mine in lovemaking
    are already folded in his small body.
    To be an adult means
    to bake the bread of yearning
    all night long, with reddened face
    in front of the fire. My child sees.
    And the powerful spell See you soon
    which he’s learned to say
    works only among the dead.

    National Thoughts
    A woman, caught in a homeland-trap of the Chosen People: you.
    Cossack’s fur hat on your head: you the
    offspring of their pogroms. “After these things had come to pass,”
    always.
    Or, for example, your face: slanting eyes,
    eyes descended from massacre. High cheekbones
    of a hetman, head of murderers.
    But a mitzvah dance of Hasidim,
    naked on a rock at twilight,
    beside the water canopies of Ein Gedi,
    with eyes closed and body open like hair. After
    these things had come to pass. “Always.”
    People caught in a homeland-trap:
    to speak now in this weary language,
    a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,
    it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
    miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.
    Square letters want to stay
    closed; each letter a closed house,
    to stay and to close yourself in
    and to sleep inside it, forever.

    A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention
    They amputated
    your thighs from my hips.
    As far as I’m concerned, they’re always
    doctors. All of them.
    They dismantled us
    from each other. As far as I’m concerned,
    they’re engineers.
    A pity. We were such a good and loving
    invention: an airplane made of a man and a woman,
    wings and all:
    we even got off
    the ground a little.
    We even flew.

    Elegy
    The wind won’t come to draw smiles in the sand of dreams.
    The wind will be strong.
    And people are walking without flowers,
    unlike their children in the festival of the first fruits.
    And a few of them are victors and most of them are vanquished,
    passing through the arch of others’ victories
    and as on the Arch of Titus everything appears, in bas-relief:
    the warm and belovéd bed, the faithful and much-scrubbed pot,
    and the lamp, not the one