Poems by Yehuda Amichai

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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Of Three Or Four In The Room

Out of three or four in the room

One is always standing at the window.

Forced to see the injustice amongst the thorns,

The fires on the hills.

And people who left whole

Are brought home in the evening, like small change.

Out of three or four in the room

One is always standing at the window.

Yehuda Amichai

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.

Yehuda Amichai

A Jewish Cemetery In Germany

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

for the dead praise not the Lord.

Only the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves

and cheering

each time they find one—like mushrooms in the forest, like

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

Yehuda Amichai

And We Shall Not Get Excited

And we shall not get excited. Because a translator

May not get excited. Calmly, we shall pass on

Words from man to son, from one tongue

To others' lips, un-

Knowingly, like a father who passes on

The features of his dead father's face

To his son, and he himself is like neither of them. Merely a mediator.

We shall remember the things we held in our hands

Yehuda Amichai

I Want To Die In My Own Bed

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.

Like slits in a tank, their eyes were uncanny,

I'm always the few and they are the many.

I must answer. They can interrogate My head.

But I want to die in My own bed.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

You Mustn't Show Weakness

You mustn't show weakness

and you've got to have a tan.

But sometimes I feel like the thin veils

of Jewish women who faint

at weddings and on Yom Kippur.

You mustn't show weakness

and you've got to make a list

of all the things you can load

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 didvided

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

Yehuda Amichai

Do Not Accept

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

To surrender. Try this year too

To live alone in the long summer,

Eat your drying bread, refrain

From tears. And do not learn from

Yehuda Amichai

My Father

The memory of my father is wrapped up in

white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits

out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands

overflowed with good deeds.

Yehuda Amichai

I Know A Man

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.

Translated by Chana Bloch

Yehuda Amichai