Profile
Photos
Comments
Wildpeace
Not
the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can
talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that
makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to
open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of
beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the
heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A
little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the
orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
~
Yehuda Amichai ~
Not
the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can
talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that
makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to
open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of
beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the
heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A
little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the
orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
~
Yehuda Amichai ~
(The Selected, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen
Mitchell)
Mitchell)
Yehuda Amichai (May 3, 1924 - September 22, 2000,
Hebrew: was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many to be the greatest modern Israeli poet, and was one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Amichai
Referring to him as "the great Israeli poet," Jonathan Wilson in The New York Times (December 10, 2000), wrote that he "is one of very few contemporary
poets to have reached a broad cross-section without compromising his
art. He was loved by his readers worldwide (his poems have been
translated into more than 30 languages) perhaps only as the Russians
loved their poets in the early part of the last century. It is not hard
to see why. Amichai's poems are easy on the surface and yet profound:
humorous, ironic and yet full of passion, secular but God-engaged,
allusive but accessible, charged with metaphor and yet remarkably
concrete. Most of all, they are, like the speaking persona in his Letter of Recommendation, full of love: Oh,
touch me, touch me, you good woman! / This is not a scar you feel under
my shirt. / It is a letter of recommendation, folded, / from my father:
/ 'He is still a good boy and full of love.'
"He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years," wrote Wilson, "but he knew that as far as
the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal
politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the
wrong side of the stockade."
