Behind All This...

He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war... -Foreword to a Yehuda Amichai anthology.

#4 of Amichai's Seven Laments for the War-Dead

4
I came upon an old zoology textbook,
Brehm, Volume II, Birds:
in sweet phrases, an account of the life of the starling,
swallow, and thrush. Full of mistakes in antiquated
Gothic typeface, but full of love, too. "Our feathered
friends." "Migrate from us to warmer climes."
Nest, speckled egg, soft plumage, nightingale,
stork. "The harbirngers of spring." The robin,
red-breasted.

Year of publication: 1913, Germany,
on the eve of the war that was to be
the eve of all my wars.
My good friend who died in my arms, in
his blood,
on the sands of Ashdod. 1948, June.

Oh my-friend,
red-breasted.

If I am destined to lack whatever it is that I am supposed to become, it will be because I did not move to Israel. If I become one more Philip Roth knock-off, it will be because I did not become a Yehuda Amichai phony.

A secret dyadic conversation with an inanimate world exists in the stanzas of his arcs, the disappointment and fascination produced by his shrugging shoulders. No one will ever build that again, there are no voices capable of being his, there may never have been.

His pages are frequently carried in war by teenage soldiers, but they are soft, uninciting words, self-effacing, self-lacerating, self-aware words offering no solace in grief, just the shatteringly universal, unapproached epitomes, consciences, apostasies, some reprieve for living as we do...at the expense of the determination of others and the loves we crush, the injustices wrought against us back.

I was not brilliant enough to be born in Germany, son of a shopkeeper, grandson of a farmer, to have left in 1936 for Palestine to avoid what was forecast to deaf ears, to fight with the British in World War II, the Palmach in the War of Independence, the IDF in '56 and '73, all unwanted quests.

To be robbed of youth, maybe we all share that, to serve tenure to an unrelenting historical chain of duty, yes, to see death unironically bereft of the obligation to assuage. How? He sighs at an empty field that is stocked with life that cannot be shared so it is forced meager. I embarrass myself.

He presented a poem at Oslo, for a treaty that would only beget more war. Rabin read him at his Nobel Peace Prize awarding, a year before Rabin was shot to death after a peace rally. The only poetic justice, Amichai would die six days before he could see the Second Intifada began.

From #7

"Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding." No use
crying inside and screaming outside.
Behind all this, some great happiness may be hiding.