I’ve been hanging my daily poems this month around my
office walls. One of my colleagues caught a few of them and wondered why I’ve
got such dreary poetry decorating the place. Well, first off—he overlooked
Shakespeare and Carroll. But I’ll concede the point that this year I’ve been
pulling in some difficult topics. And here’s another, this time from Israeli
poet Yehuda Amichai.
Amichai was born in Germany, but his family emigrated to
the (then British) Palestine Mandate territory when he was 11. Like some of my
other choices this month (Sidney,
Gurney,
Radnóti),
Amichai served in the military. First in the British army during World War II, then in
the Israeli army in various wars against the Arabs.
He took as subjects the everyday world he found around him,
which is one of the reasons I find “The Diameter of the Bomb” so gripping. The everyday
world around him was violent, and the way he measures out the impact of that
violence here, juxtaposing all the impersonal numbers and geometry against the dreadful
human cost, is poetry at its most powerful.
“The Diameter of the Bomb”
The
diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and
the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with
four dead and eleven wounded.
And
around these, in a larger circle
of
pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and
one graveyard. But the young woman
who
was buried in the city she came from,
at
a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges
the circle considerably,
and
the solitary man mourning her death
at
the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes
the entire world in the circle.
And
I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that
reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond,
making
a
circle with no end and no God.
Translation by Chana Bloch
No comments:
Post a Comment