Yehuda Amichai - Tumblr Posts

“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 airplane made from a man and wife. Wings and everything. We hovered a little above the earth. We even flew a little.”

— “A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention,” Yehuda Amichai (via mythofdevotion)

“What are you doing here between the promised and the forgotten, Between the hoped for and the imagined?”

— Yehuda Amichai, from “Lying in Wait for Happiness,“ Poems of Jerusalem & Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992)

In the middle of this century we turned to each other With half faces and full eyes like an ancient Egyptian picture And for a short while. I stroked your hair In the opposite direction to your journey, We called to each other, Like calling out the names of towns Where nobody stops Along the route. Lovely is the world rising early to evil, Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity, In the mingling of ourselves, you and I, Lovely is the world. The earth drinks men and their loves Like wine, To forget. It can’t. And like the contours of the Judean hills, We shall never find peace. In the middle of this century we turned to each other, I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me, The leather straps for a long journey Already tightening across my chest. I spoke in praise of your mortal hips, You spoke in praise of my passing face, I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey, I touched your flesh, prophet of your end, I touched your hand which has never slept, I touched your mouth which may yet sing. Dust from the desert covered the table At which we did not eat But with my finger I wrote on it The letters of your name. — Yehuda Amichai, from “In the Middle of This Century,“ Poems of Jerusalem & Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992)

another translation

And soon in the coming nights, we shall appear, like wandering minstrels, each in the other’s dream.

And into these dreams will be strangers we did not know together.

— Yehuda Amichai, from “If With a Bitter Mouth,“ Poems of Jerusalem & Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992)  

Yehuda Amichai, from Selected Poetry of Y. Amichai; “Poems for a Woman,”