Three Poems by Yehuda Amichai - Issue No. 7 Winter/Spring 1999
Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

The Famous French King

The famous French king said, Apres moi, le deluge!
And Noah the Righteous said, Before me, the flood,
and when he left the ark he declared, The flood is behind me.
And I say, I am right in the middle of the flood,
I am the ark and the animals, clean and unclean,
I am two of a kind, male and female,
I am the remembering animals and the forgetting animals,
and I am the seedling of the vine for the good world
though I can't drink the wine myself.
In the end I'll be a tall Ararat, lonely and dry,
carrying a strange empty ark on my shoulders
with some leftover love inside it, a remnant of prayer, a scrap of hope.

 

I Know How Slight

I know how slight are the threads that tie me to my joy
but from those slight threads I've woven me strong clothing
like a soft armor, the warp and-weft of joy
to help me cover my nakedness and protect me.
But sometimes it seems to me my life isn't worth
the skin of my body that wraps around it, not even
these fingernails with which I hang onto my
life. I'm like a person who holds his wrist up
to catch a glimpse of time, even when he doesn't have a watch on.
And sometimes the gurgling of the last waters
draining from the bathtub is a nightingale's song to my ear.

 

 

An Ideal Woman

I know a man who put together an ideal woman
from all his desires: the hair
he took from a woman in the window of a passing bus,
the forehead from a cousin who died young, the hands
from a teacher he had as a kid, the cheeks from a little girl,
his childhood love, the mouth from a woman he noticed
in a phone booth, the thighs
from a young woman lying on the beach,
the alluring gaze from this one, the eyes from that one,
the waistline from a newspaper ad.
From all these he put together
a woman he truly loved. And when he died, they came,
all the women - legs chopped off, eyes plucked out, faces slashed in half,
severed hands, hair ripped out, a gash where a mouth used to be,
and demanded what was theirs, theirs, theirs,
dismembered his body, tore his flesh, and left him
only his long-lost soul.