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.

Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai was an acclaimed Israeli poet noted for his lyrical voice and reflections on love, war, and the human condition. Born in Germany, he emigrated to Palestine in 1936. Amichai's poetry, blending the personal and political, has been translated into numerous languages. His works remains influential in Israeli and global literature. Among his best-known collections are "Now and in Other Days" and "A Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers".

Yehuda Amichai

A Precise Woman

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

You Mustn't Show Weakness

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

My Father

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

Half The People In The World

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

English

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Yad Mordechai

Yad Mordechai. Those who fell here
still look out the windows like sick children
who are not allowed outside to play.
And on the hillside, the battle is reenacted
for the benefit of hikers and tourists. Soldiers of thin sheet iron
rise and fall and rise again. Sheet iron dead and a sheet iron life
and the voices allsheet iron. And the resurrection of the dead,
sheet iron that clangs and clangs.

And I said to myself: Everyone is attached to his own lament
as to a parachute. Slowly he descends and slowly hovers
until he touches the hard place.

Yehuda Amichai

The Shepherd's Lament.

On yonder lofty mountain

A thousand times I stand,
And on my staff reclining,

Look down on the smiling land.

My grazing flocks then I follow,

My dog protecting them well;
I find myself in the valley,

But how, I scarcely can tell.

The whole of the meadow is cover'd

With flowers of beauty rare;
I pluck them, but pluck them unknowing

To whom the offering to bear.

In rain and storm and tempest,

I tarry beneath the tree,
But closed remaineth yon portal;

'Tis all but a vision to me.

High over yonder dwelling,

There rises a rainbow gay;
But she from home hath departed

And wander'd far, far away.

Yes, far away bath she wander'd,

Perchance e'en over ...

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My Child Wafts Peace

My child wafts peace.
When I lean over him,
It is not just the smell of soap.

All the people were children wafting peace.
(And in the whole land, not even one
Millstone remained that still turned).

Oh, the land torn like clothes
That can't be mended.
Hard, lonely fathers even in the cave of the Makhpela*
Childless silence.

My child wafts peace.
His mother's womb promised him
What God cannot
Promise us.

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On Rabbi Kook's Street

On Rabbi Kook's Street
I walk without this good man,
A streiml he wore for prayer
A silk top hat he wore to govern,
fly in the wind of the dead
above me, float on the water
of my dreams.

I come to the Street of Prophets, there are none.
And the Street of Ethiopians, there are a few. I'm
looking for a place for you to live after me
padding your solitary nest for you,
setting up the place of my pain with the sweat of my brow
examining the road on which you'll return
and the window of your room, the gaping wound,
between closed and opened, between light and dark.

There are smells of baking from inside the shanty,
there's a shop where they distribute Bibles free,
free, free. More than one prophet
has left this tangle of lanes
while every...

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Ein Yahav

A night drive to Ein Yahav in the Arava Desert,
a drive in the rain. Yes, in the rain.
There I met people who grow date palms,
there I saw tamarisk trees and risk trees,
there I saw hope barbed as barbed wire.
And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be
like barbed wire to keep out despair,
hope must be a mine field.

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The Sheep And The Goat

    The thousand streets of London gray
    Repel all country sights;
    But bar not winds upon their way,
    Nor quench the scent of new-mown hay
    In depth of summer nights.

    And here and there an open spot,
    Still bare to light and dark,
    With grass receives the wanderer hot;
    There trees are growing, houses not--
    They call the place a park.

    Soft creatures, with ungentle guides,
    God's sheep from hill and plain,
    Flow thitherward in fitful tides,
    There weary lie on woolly sides,
    Or crop the grass amain.

    And from dark alley, yard, and den,
    In ragged skirts and coats,
    Come thither children of poor men,
    Wild things, untaught of word or pen--
    The little human goats.
...

George MacDonald