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

with the seven branches, but the simple one,
    the good one, which didn’t fail even on winter nights,
    and the table, a domestic animal that stands on four legs and keeps
    silent. . . .
    And they are brought into the arena to fight with wild beasts
    and they see the heads of the spectators in the stadium
    and their courage is like the crying of their children,
    persistent, persistent and ineffectual.
    And in their back pocket, letters are rustling,
    and the victors put the words into their mouths
    and if they sing, it is not their own song,
    and the victors set large yearnings inside them
    like loaves of dough
    and they bake these in their love
    and the victors will eat the warm bread and they won’t.
    But a bit of their love remains on them
    like the primitive decorations on ancient urns:
    the first, modest line of emotion all around
    and then the swirl of dreams
    and then two parallel lines,
    mutual love,
    or a pattern of small flowers, a memory of childhood, high-stalked
    and thin-legged.

    Threading
    Loving each other began this way: threading
    loneliness into loneliness
    patiently, our hands trembling and precise.
    Longing for the past gave our eyes
    the double security of what won’t change
    and of what can’t be returned to.
    But the heart must kill one of us
    on one of its forays,
    if not you—me,
    when it comes back empty-handed,
    like Cain, a boomerang from the field.

    Now in the Storm
    Now in the storm before the calm
    I can tell you what
    in the calm before the storm I didn’t say
    because they would have heard us and discovered our hiding-place.
    That we were just neighbors in the fierce wind,
    brought together in the ancient hamsin from Mesopotamia.
    And the Latter Prophets of my veins’ kingdom
    prophesied into the firmament of your flesh.
    And the weather was good for us and for the heart,
    and the sun’s muscles were flexed inside us and golden
    in the Olympiad of emotions, on the faces of thousands of spectators,
    so that we would know, and remain, and there would again be clouds.
    Look, we met in a protected place, in the angle
    where history began to arise, quiet
    and safe from all the hasty events.
    And the voice began to tell stories in the evening, by the children’s bed.
    And now it’s too early for archaeology
    and too late to repair what has been done.
    Summer will arrive, and the clop, clop of the hard sandals
    will sink in the soft sand, forever.

    Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela
    You ate and were filled, you came
    in your twelfth year, in the Thirties
    of the world, with short pants that reached down to your knees,
    tassels dangling from your undershawl
    sticky between your legs in the sweltering land.
    Your skin still smooth, without protective hair.
    The brown, round eyes you had, according
    to the pattern of ripe cherries, will get used to
    oranges. Orange scents. Innocence.
    Clocks were set, according
    to the beats of the round heart, train tracks
    according to the capacity of children’s feet.
    And silently, like a doctor and mother, the days bent over me
    and started to whisper to one another, while the grass
    already was laid flat by the bitter wind
    on the slope of hills I will never walk on again.
    Moon and stars and ancient deeds of grownups
    were placed on a high shelf beyond
    my arm’s reach;
    and I stood in vain underneath the forbidden bookshelves.
    But even then I was marked for annihilation like an orange scored
    for peeling, like chocolate, like a hand-grenade for explosion and death.
    The hand of fate held me, aimed. My skies were the
    inside of the soft palm wrapped around me, and on the outside:
    rough skin, hard stars, protruding veins,
    airplane routes, black hairs, mortar-shell trajectories
    in silence or in wailing, in black or in radiant flares.
    And before I was real and lingering here
    the heart’s shoulders carried an anguish not mine
    and from somewhere else ideas entered, slowed-down
    and with a deep rumble, like a train
    into the hollow, listening