Once A Great Love

Once a great love cut my life in two.
The first part goes on twisting
at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The passing years have calmed me
and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

And I'm like someone standing in the Judean desert, looking at a sign:
"Sea Level"
He cannot see the sea, but he knows.

Thus I remember your face everywhere
at your "face Level."

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

The School Where I Studied

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

Quick And Bitter

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

Forgetting Someone

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

English

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Try To Remember Some Details

Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
Try to remember some details. For they have no face
and their soul is hidden and their crying is the same as their laughter,
and their silence and their shouting rise to one height
and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees
and they have no life outside this narrow space
and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory
and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing
and paper cups that are used once only.

Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live...

Yehuda Amichai

Near The Wall Of A House

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.


Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

Yehuda Amichai

I Don't Know If History Repeats Itself

I don't Know if history repeats itself
But I do know that you don't.

I remember that city was divided
Not only between Jews and Arabs,
But Between me and you,
When we were there together.

We made ourselves a womb of dangers
We built ourselves a house of deadening wars
Like men of far north
Who build themselves a safe warm house of deadening ice.

The city has been reunited
But we haven't been there together.
By now I know
That History doesn't repeat itself,
As I always knew that you wouldn't.

Yehuda Amichai

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 wordsand without ever understandig,
and put flagpoles on top of my house and a bob s...

Yehuda Amichai

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.

Yehuda Amichai

Quick And Bitter

The end was quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet was the time between us,
slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair but in the love
of your body which came between them.

And when I entered into you
it seemed then that great happiness
could be measured with precision
of sharp pain. Quick and bitter.

Slow and sweet were the nights.
Now is bitter and grinding as sand,
"Let's be sensible" and similar curses.

And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences so long and orderly.
Had we remained together
we could have become a silence.

Yehuda Amichai