The School Where I Studied

I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain
the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge,
I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,
the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites.
I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil,
I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die.
I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room
where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open
to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape
we were seeing from the window.
The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones.
I remember the brief tumult of the two of us
near the rickety steps, the tumult
that was the beginning of a first great love.
Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,
like everything else in Jerusalem.

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

Once A Great Love

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

Memorial Day For The War Dead

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

A Precise Woman

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

What Kind Of A Person

Yehuda Amichai, Simple Poetry

English

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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

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

In School-Days

Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow,
And blackberry-vines are creeping.

Within, the masters desk is seen,
Deep scarred by raps official;
The warping floor, the battered seats,
The jack-knifes carved initial;

The charcoal frescos on its wall;
Its doors worn sill, betraying
The feet that, creeping slow to school,
Went storming out to playing!

Long years ago a winter sun
Shone over it at setting;
Lit up its western window-panes,
And low eaves icy fretting.

It touched the tangled golden curls,
And brown eyes full of grieving,
Of one who still her steps delayed
When all the school were leaving.

For near her stood the little boy
Her childish fav...

John Greenleaf Whittier

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

Memories Of Schooldays.

There are mem'ries glad of the old school-house,
Which throng around me still;
And voices spoke in my youthful days,
My ears with music fill.

Those youthful voices I seem to hear,
With their gladsome, joyous tone,
And joy and hope they bring to me,
When I am all alone.

I think of the joys of that time long past,
Of its boyish hopes and fears,
And 'tis partly joy, and partly pain,
That wets my eyes with tears.

For 'tis joy I feel, when I seem to stand,
Where I stood long years ago,
And when I think that cannot be,
My heart is fill'd with woe.

My old school mates are scatter'd far,
And some are with the dead,
And my old class mates have wander'd, too,
To seek for fame, or bread.

And those who still are near my ho...

Thomas Frederick Young