Yehuda Amichai the poet and his poems
Amichai's
poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical issues of
the meaning of life and death. His work is characterized by gentle irony and original, often
surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with
religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious
experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological
humanism.
Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability for transforming the
personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into
everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."
God Full Of
Mercy by Yehuda Amichai
God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the
dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.
I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.
I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.
Concomitant
with his non-traditional choice of subjects is Amichai's innovative use of the
Hebrew language. Drawing from and interfacing various strata of language, from
classical Hebrew to the post-modern colloquial, Amichai became known as the
“poet who plays with words.” Influenced by the wit and irony of modern English
poetry, Amichai, also a master of understatement, coined new idioms and slang
expressions, and incorporated prose phrases in his work. As with his imagery
and subject matter, his linguistic versatility reflects his sense that
language, including poetic language, emerges out of the modern technological
society rather than classical texts only. Hence the citation of the Israel Prize,
awarded to Amichai in 1982, which heralded “the revolutionary change in
poetry's language” that the poet had begun through his work.
Love Of Jerusalem
There is a street where they sell
only red meat
And there is a street where they sell only clothes and perfumes. And there
is a day when I see only cripples and the blind
And those covered with leprosy, and spastics and those with twisted lips.
Here they build a house and there they destroy
Here they dig into the earth
And there they dig into the sky,
Here they sit and there they walk
Here they hate and there they love.
But he who loves Jerusalem
By the tourist book or the prayer book
is like one who loves a women
By a manual of sex positions.
And there is a street where they sell only clothes and perfumes. And there
is a day when I see only cripples and the blind
And those covered with leprosy, and spastics and those with twisted lips.
Here they build a house and there they destroy
Here they dig into the earth
And there they dig into the sky,
Here they sit and there they walk
Here they hate and there they love.
But he who loves Jerusalem
By the tourist book or the prayer book
is like one who loves a women
By a manual of sex positions.
Amichai's
poetry spans a range of emotions, from laughter to sadness to self-mockery. His
work emphasizes the individual who, although conscious and integrally part of
the collective experience, ultimately views the world through his personal
lens. This individual perspective evinces a candid, honest approach to the outside
world.
An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His
Goat On Mount Zion
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
In Amichai one almost always encounters a
delight in figurative language; yet his poems are never pretentious or tedious,
since they speak out of the everyday and towards concerns we encounter every
day. His great themes are love and loss: he celebrates life with vibrancy
and energy and a relish for feeling, yet at the same time he is intensely aware
of what is lost as history, both personal and social, shears away from each
individual things he or she holds dear.
Seven
Laments for the War-Dead
“…Is all of this sorrow? I
guess so.
“May ye find consolation in the building
of the homeland.” But how long
can you go on building the homeland
and not fall behind in the terrible
three-sided race
between consolation and building and death?”
“…Memorial Day for the war-dead: go tack on
the grief of all your losses –
including a woman who left you –
to the grief of losing them: go mix
one sorrow with another, like history,
that in its economical way
heaps pain and feast and sacrifice
onto a single day for easy reference.
Though he wrote
about a wide array of subjects, idiosyncratic Jerusalem was the well to which
he kept returning throughout his life. In perhaps his most-quoted paean to city
life, Amichai explored the overlap of Jerusalem's ancient history with its
contemporary vibrant population:
Jerusalem 1967On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of
Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall
shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.
I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.
When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates
prayer.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.
Amichai was
not a political poet in the conventional sense but he continuously tried to
understand the complicated world that we live in and reconcile between
conflicting sides. He wrote in one of his peace poems "I, may I rest in
peace -I, who am still living, say: may I have peace in the rest of my life...
I don't want to fulfill my parents prophecy that life is war."
Tourists
Visits of condolence is all we get
from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
*
Jerusalem
On a roof in the Old City
Laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
The white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
The towel of a man who is my enemy,
To wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
A kite.
At the other end of the string,
A child
I can't see
Because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
They have put up many flags.
To make us think that they're happy.
To make them think that we're happy.
Laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
The white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
The towel of a man who is my enemy,
To wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
A kite.
At the other end of the string,
A child
I can't see
Because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
They have put up many flags.
To make us think that they're happy.
To make them think that we're happy.
This
yearning for peace accompanied him from the very beginning and was most
significantly reflected in his life and poetry: "Men wear their first love
and not battle decorations" (from "We loved here").
Wildpeace
Not the peace of cease-fire,
Let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
But rather
as in the heart after the excitement is over,
when you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that’s why I am an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds –
Who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
To the next, as in a relay race:
The baton never falls.)
Let it be
Like wildflowers,
Suddenly, because the field
Must have it: a wildpeace.
I chose 8 poems to present here. Following
the overall theme of my presentation, a dialogue, I looked for the ones that
relate to political – social issues and of course the ones that throw in his
love of Jerusalem into the mix.
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