Ode to Poetry: Love Poems from Yehuda Amichai

Songs for a Woman (Excerpt)

wherever you love 

furniture must be removed from the room 

trees, mountains, seas—all of it
gone from the narrow world.

4.
When you smile
serious ideas suddenly get drowsy 

all night the mountains keep silent at your side—
at morning, the sand goes out with you, to sea 

when you do nice things to me
all heavy industry shuts down

Advice for Good Love

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away.  Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death.  Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of 

the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned 
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.