Yehuda Amichai: I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once

While surfing logic and computation blogs, I stumbled upon Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity and chanced upon some poems of Yehuda Amichai. I was immediately transported back to many years ago when I was browsing books at Borders and chanced upon a collection of Amichai’s poems. I remember being so struck by his poems that I bought the collection of poems I was reading.

Here’s part of a poem You mustn’t show weakness posted on Vanity of Vanities (I think he has the same translation of the poem as I do), which I’ve overlooked in my book:

And you mustn’t show weakness. Sometimes I collapse inside myself Without people noticing. I’m like an ambulance On two legs carrying the patient Inside myself to a no-aid station With sirens blaring. People think it’s normal speech.

Here’s another Amichai poem from me:

I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once I walked past a house where I lived once: a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there. Many years have passed with the quiet hum of the staircase bulb going on and off and on again. The keyholes are like little wounds where all the blood seeped out. And inside, people pale as death. I want to stance once again as I did holding my first love all night long in the doorway. When we left at dawn, the house began to fall apart and since then the city and since then the whole world. I want to be filled with longing again till dark burn marks show on my skin. I want to be written again in the Book of Life, to be written every single day till the writing hand hurts.

“Throughout his career, he was written about memory and the burdens of memory; about the lingering sweetness and simplicity of his parents’ lives set against the perplexities of his own; about war as loss and love as a hedge against loss…Amichai holds on tightly to whatever he has lost. “What I will never see again I must love forever” is his first article of faith. That is why there are so many elegies of love here…What Amichai loves best is the ordinary human being with his pain and his joy, a museum in his heart and shopping baskets at his side. ”

From the Foreword to The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.

Links: Huck Gutman’s page Some Amichai poems from plagiarist poetry archive Condolence page Article on Amichai from The Source Israel Online Magazine