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Yehuda Amichai
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Yehuda Amichai Poems
- A Pity. We Were Such A Good In... They amputated Your ...
- God Full Of Mercy God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the ...
- An Arab Shepherd Is Searching ...
- God Has Pity On Kindergarten C... God has pity on ...
- Endless Poem In a modern museum In an old synagogue In the ...
- If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem If I forget thee, ...
- My Father The memory of my father is wrapped up in white ...
Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. According to literary scholar Nili Scharf Gold, a childhood trauma in Germany had an impact on his later poetry: he had an argument with a childhood friend of his, Ruth Hanover, that caused her to bicycle home angrily; she fell and as a result had to get her leg amputated. Several years later, she was unable to join the rest of her family, who fled the Nazi takeover, due to her missing leg, and ended up being killed in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth".
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 12 to ... more »
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A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
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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.
(Yehuda Amichai - translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)
Another poem by Yehuda Amichai:
A Man In His Life
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose.
Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur.
It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
Amichai speaks in the direct idom of emotion that descended from Whitman's rhythmic prose-poem style. When I read such poems as 'Inside the Apple, ' 'The Real Hero, ' or 'A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention, ' I understand again that great lyrical poetry is capable of translating the deepest emotions into langauge that brings us to the ground of what living a human life means. That is, his best poems are really hymns to this life full of paradoxical disappointments and exhilarating passion fused with elegies to the duration of those experiences themselves that bring our strongest affirmations.