Thursday, September 30, 2010

yehuda amichai, you rock my 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 words and without ever understanding,
and put flagpoles on top of my house and a bomb shelter
underneath. And go out on raids made only for
returning and go through all the appalling
stations—cat,stick,fire,water,butcher,
between the kid and the angel of death?
Half the people love,
half the people hate.
And where is my place between such well-matched halves,
and through what crack will I see the white housing
projects of my dreams and the bare foot runners
on the sands or, at least, the waving of a girl's
kerchief, beside the mound?

3 comments:

  1. "What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
    I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
    Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
    Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
    But with an old body from ancient times
    And with a God even older than my body.
    I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
    Low places, caves and wells
    Frighten me. Mountain peaks
    And tall buildings scare me.
    I'm not like an inserted fork,
    Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

    I'm not flat and sly
    Like a spatula creeping up from below.
    At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
    Mashing good and bad together
    For a little taste
    And a little fragrance.

    Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
    My business carefully and quietly
    Like a long will that began to be written
    The moment I was born.

    s Now I stand at the side of the street
    Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
    I can stand here for nothing, free.

    I'm not a car, I'm a person,
    A man-god, a god-man
    Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.

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  2. yer most welcome, glad to have returned the favor of sharing.
    you offer so much here it's good to be able to respond a bit in kind.
    -dmf

    ReplyDelete