If I forget thee, Jerusalem

In the following two poems, Palestinian poet Mu’in Bseiso and Israel’s Yehuda Amichai both play on the words of Psalm 137 (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,/let my right hand forget...”)1 as a means to express their love for the land:

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

 Yehuda Amichai

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Then let my right be forgotten.
Let my right be forgotten, and my left remember.
Let my left remember, and your right close
And your mouth open near the gate.

I shall remember Jerusalem
And forget the forest -- my love will remember,
Will open her hair, will close my window,
will forget my right,
Will forget my left.

If the west wind does not come
I'll never forgive the walls,
Or the sea, or myself.
Should my right forget
My left shall forgive,
I shall forget all water,
I shall forget my mother.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Let my blood be forgotten.
I shall touch your forehead,
Forget my own,
My voice change
For the second and last time
To the most terrible of voices --
Or silence.
 ***

The God of Urushalim2

Let my right hand forget me,
let my beloved’s eyes,
my brother and my only friend
all forget me.

If I remember not
that the God of Urushalim
lies heavily on [the chest of]
our land,
squeezing honey and milk
out of drops of our blood,
to live
and hatch out monsters. 

I thought that it will be interesting to start the part of the presentation about Palestinian poetry with these poems. In these poems, both poets express a deep, personal connection to Jerusalem, associating the city with their own blood, their bodies, and their closest family members. Both give a sense of danger and imminent pain at the possibility of losing or forgetting Jerusalem, and both imply that the act of “forgetting” or not fighting for Jerusalem would be a disgrace to their brothers and mothers.

Nevertheless, although the two poets use the same metaphor to address the same theme, each writes in the context of his own society, culture, and poetic tradition. Amichai, born in Germany and raised as an Orthodox Jew, has lived most of his life in Jerusalem. In his youth, he served in the British Army and in Israel’s Palmach force in the 1948 war. In “If I Forget Thee,” Amichai uses Psalm 137 as a lens through which to reflect on his own behavior and his personal relationship to Jerusalem, the land, and God. He takes the burden of forgetting on himself with the lines “Should my right forget.../I shall forget all water/I shall forget my mother.” He intimates that if he should ever forget his allegiance to Jerusalem, he will suffer personally and will lose any sense of himself, even his own voice.

Bseiso, on the other hand, uses the psalm to criticize Israeli oppression and to remind the Palestinian people of their obligation to fight for Jerusalem. Bseiso grew up in Gaza in the 1930s and 1940s, but because of his political activism, spent most of his life in exile in other Arab countries until his death in 1982. In his poem, Bseiso implores his people to remember that the “God of Urushalim lies heavily” on the land of Palestine, “squeezing honey and milk” out of Palestinian blood. His use of the term “God of Urushalim” to represent Israel is heavily ironic, suggesting that the Israelis use their religion to justify controlling the land and oppressing the Palestinian people. He plays on the biblical description of the Land of Canaan (now Israel) as the “land of milk and honey,” to accuse the Israelis of building their homeland on the suffering of Palestinians — “out of drops of our blood.” The poem also implies that any Palestinian who does not “remember” and fight against the “God of Urushalim” will lose his right hand, or his identity, and everyone that he loves.