Monday, April 25, 2016

Proud-pied April: A circle with no God

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



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