Yehuda Amichai

poems
poems

A

A Man In His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather
them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything

What Kind Of A Person

"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.

I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

I'm not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.

Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.

I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.

A Dog After Love

After you left me
I let a dog smell at
My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose
And set out to find you.

I hope it will tear the
Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis
Or at least
Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An airplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

Forgetting Someone
Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the
light in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day
But then it is the light that makes you remember.

Half The People In The World

Half the people in the world love the other half,
half the people hate the other half.
Must I because of this half and that half go
wandering
and changing ceaselessly like rain in its cycle,
must I sleep among rocks, and grow rugged like
the trunks of olive trees,
and hear the moon barking at me,
and camouflage my love with worries,
and sprout like frightened grass between the railroad tracks,
and live underground like a mole,
and remain with roots
and not with branches, and not feel my cheek against the cheek of angels,
and love in the first cave, and marry my wife
beneath a canopy of beams that support the earth,
and act out my death, always till the last breath
and the last words and without ever understanding,
and put flagpoles on top of my house
and a bomb shelter underneath.
And go out on rads made only for returning
and go through all the appalling
stations—cat,stick,fire,water,butcher,
between the kid and the angel of death?
Half the people love,
half the people hate.
And where is my place between such well-matched halves,
and through what crack will I see the white housing
projects of my dreams and the bare foot runners
on the sands or, at least, the waving of a girl's
kerchief, beside the mound?

I Know A Man

I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.

Before

Before the gate has been closed,
Before the last quetion is posed,
Before I am transposed.
Before the weeds fill the gardens,
Before there are no pardons,
Before the concrete hardens.
Before all the flute-holes are covered,
Beore things are locked in then cupboard,
Before the rules are discovered.
Before the conclusion is planned,
Before God closes his hand,
Before we have nowhere to stand.

My God,the Soul

My God, the soul
you gave me
is smoke-
from never-ending burnings
of memories of love.

The minute we are born
we start burning them
and so on
until the smoke
dies, like smoke.

On Some Other Planet You May Be Right

"On some other planet you may be right be right,
but not here." In the middle of talking you shifted
to a silent weeping, as people shift from blue to black
in the middle of a letter when a pen goes dry,
or as they used to change horses during a journey.
Talk grew tired, tears
are fresh.

Seeds of summer flew into the moon
we where sitting in. In front of the window
there was an almond tree growing black:
one more warrior in the eternal battle
of swet against the bitter.

Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.

But we will remember this evening
the way swimmers remember the strokes
from one summer to the next. "On some other planet
you may be right, but not here."

The Hour of Grace

I used to think it could be solved this way:
like people gathering in the station at midnight
for the last bus that will not come,
at first just a few, then more and more.
That was a chance to be close to one another,
to change everything, together
to start a new world.

But they disperse.
(The hour of grace has passed. It won't
come again.)Each one will go his own way.
Each will be like a domino again
with one side up, looking
for another piece to match it
in games that go on and on.