The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Read Online Free

sleep.

    Look: Thoughts and Dreams
    Look: thoughts and dreams are weaving over us
    their warp and woof, their wide camouflage-net,
    and the reconnaissance planes and God
    will never know
    what we really want
    and where we are going.
    Only the voice that rises at the end of a question
    still rises above the world and hangs there,
    even if it was made by
    mortar shells, like a ripped flag,
    like a mutilated cloud.
    Look, we too are going
    in the reverse-flower-way:
    to begin with a calyx exulting toward the light,
    to descend with the stem growing more and more solemn,
    to arrive at the closed earth and to wait there for a while,
    and to end as a root, in the darkness, in the deep womb.

    From We Loved Here
    1
    My father spent four years inside their war,
    and did not hate his enemies, or love.
    And yet I know that somehow, even there,
    he was already forming me, out of
    his calms, so few and scattered, which he gleaned
    among the bombs exploding and the smoke,
    and put them in his knapsack, in between
    the remnants of his mother’s hardening cake.
    And in his eyes he took the nameless dead,
    he stored them, so that someday I might know
    and love them in his glance—so that I would
    not die in horror, as they all had done. . . .
    He filled his eyes with them, and yet in vain:
    to all my wars, unwilling, I must go.
    3
    The lips of dead men whisper where they lie
    deep down, their innocent voices hushed in earth,
    and now the trees and flowers grow terribly
    exaggerated, as they blossom forth.
    Bandages are again torn off in haste,
    the earth does not want healing, it wants pain.
    And spring is not serenity, not rest,
    ever, and spring is enemy terrain.
    With the other lovers, we were sent to learn
    about the strange land where the rainbow ends,
    to see if it was possible to advance.
    And we already knew: the dead return,
    and we already knew: the fiercest wind
    comes forth now from inside a young girl’s hand.
    6
    In the long nights our room was closed off and
    sealed, like a grave inside a pyramid.
    Above us: foreign silence, heaped like sand
    for aeons at the entrance to our bed.
    And when our bodies lie stretched out in sleep,
    upon the walls, again, is sketched the last
    appointment that our patient souls must keep.
    Do you see them now? A narrow boat drifts past;
    two figures stand inside it; others row.
    And stars peer out, the stars of different lives;
    are carried by the Nile of time, below.
    And like two mummies, we have been wrapped tight
    in love. And after centuries, dawn arrives;
    a cheerful archaeologist—with the light.
    18
    A preface first: the two of them, the brittle
    calm, necessity, and sun, and shade,
    an anxious father, cities braced for battle,
    and from afar, unrecognizable dead.
    The story’s climax now—the war. First leave,
    and smoke instead of streets, and he and she
    together, and a mother from her grave
    comforting: It’ll be all right, don’t worry.
    And the last laugh is this: the way she put
    his army cap on, walking to the mirror.
    And was so lovely, and the cap just fit.
    And then, behind the houses, in the yard,
    a separation like cold-blooded murder,
    and night arriving, like an afterword.

    God’s Hand in the World
    1
    God’s hand is in the world
    like my mother’s hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken
    on Sabbath eve.
    What does God see through the window
    while his hands reach into the world?
    What does my mother see?
    2
    My pain is already a grandfather:
    it has begotten two generations
    of pains that look like it.
    My hopes have erected white housing projects
    far away from the crowds inside me.
    My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk
    like a bicycle. All night outside, in the dew.
    Children mark the eras of my life
    and the eras of Jerusalem
    with moon chalk on the street.
    God’s hand in the world.

    Sort of an Apocalypse
    The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine:
    “Tonight they definitely might come. Assign
    positions, armor-plate the