Yehuda Amichai Poems

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.
...

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
...

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.
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God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children -- less.
But adults he pities not at all.
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On a little hill amid fertile fields lies a small cemetery,
a Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs,
abandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer
nor the voice of lamentation is heard there
...

Do not accept these rains that come too late.
Better to linger. Make your pain
An image of the desert. Say it's said
And do not look to the west. Refuse
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In a modern museum
In an old synagogue
In the synagogue
I
...

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
...

I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.
...

All night the army came up from Gilgal
To get to the killing field, and that's all.
In the ground, warf and woof, lay the dead.
I want to die in My own bed.
...