Open closed open: poems

Amichai writes of the language of love, and tea with roasted almonds, of desire and love. Of a Jewish cemetery whose groundskeeper is an expert on flowers and seasons of the year, but no expert on buried Jews; of Russian shirts embroidered in the colors of love and death; of Jerusalem, the city where everything sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the caftans, the monks' robes, the kaffiyehs, and young women's dresses. The poet tenderly, mischievously, breaks open the grand diction of the revered Jewish verses and supplications and suddenly discovers the light that his own experience casts upon them. Here, the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting, nostalgia for God and a better world, dust and heat, and tamarisk trees that stand as flight attendants for the next millennium, saying, "You can still get a seat on the third millennium before liftoff." Open Closed Open-poems at once meditative and playful, anxious and full of hope, sung in a language of biblical directness and meaning, that through the microcosm of the everyday give us the gift of the world at large.

The amen stone -- I wasn't one of the six million: and what is my life span? Open closed open -- I foretell the days of yor -- The Bible and you, the Bible and you, and other Midrashim -- Once I wrote Now and in other days: Thus glory passes, thus pass the psal, s -- Gods change, prayers are here to stay -- David, King of Israel, is alive: Thou art the man -- My parents' lodging place -- What has always been -- Israeli travel: Otherness is all, otherness is love -- Evening promenade on Valley of the Ghost Street -- Summer and the far end of prophecy -- Houses (plural); Love (singular) -- The language of love and tea with roasted almonds -- The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy: The touch of longing is everywhere.

In my life, on my life -- Jewish travel: Change is God and death is his prophet -- Names, names, in other days and in our time -- Jerusalem, Jerusalem, why Jerusalem? -- Conferences, conferences: Malignant words, benign speech -- My son was drafted -- Autumn, love, commercials -- And who will remember the remembers? -- The Jewish time bomb.