Thursday Poem

///
A Man Doesn't Have Time in his Life
Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.
...............................

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.
...............................

A man doesn't have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.
...............................

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.
...............................

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there's time for everything.

///

             

Comments

[Eli]

one of the most moving poems I've read in a long time - thanks!

[bilal]

fabulous. for your interest: here's a tribute to amichai by a pakistani poet, who also writes in english.
-b.

TO YEHUDA AMICHAI
by Harris Khalique

(When Israel invades Gaza and Lebanon in July 2006)
I write these lines Yehuda

For we share not words but heartbeats.

Your verse holds vast continents

Where hope is grown on trees,

Where hills are soft, surmountable,

Where rivers flow with ease.

I write these lines Yehuda

To ask for a piece of land,

Where the children of your cousins,

Could eat olives, bread and cheese,

Chase butterflies with no fear,

Where no one kills their geese.

[tyen]

That line about Ecclesiastes seemed awkward at first but after taking the whole poem in I think it did a good job of preventing a formal, ostentatious tone from developing.
The masters certainly know when to break the rules. :)

[Jim]

Thanks for the poem bilal