The Resurrection of the Dead

Yehuda Amichai (2004)
translated from Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier

We are buried with everything we did,
with our tears and our laughs.
We have made storerooms of history out of it all,
galleries of the past, and treasure houses,
buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble
in the cellars of time.
We will not take anything with us.
Even plundering kings, they all left something here.
Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad,
they all left something here, a signe, a house,
like aman who seeks to returne to a beloved place
and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,
so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.
In the same way we leave things here.
In the same way the dead leave us.

2007: A Geode by Robert B. Shaw

Posthumous Fragments

Yehuda Amichai (translated, from Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier)

A View of the Kidron Valley from Abu Tor

Where my feet once walked
my eyes now go,
and later my memories,
and later the memories of me.
The spirit of God hovers over
what should have been water
and really is water.
The crocuses have flowered early.
They have blossomed in my corruption,
they have ripened in my desire.

First Love

I was blind to you when you loved me long ago.
I switched you for another, like Isaac,
for a smell, and a taste, and an appetite for meat,
for a fragrance of the field, and a house, and a little heat.
I have forgotten the words
of the only letter I wrote to you.
All that I remember is the taste of the glue of the stamp
on my tongue.
The fate that determined us was not really
destiny,
but it was as strong and sure as the finger of the violinist
that determines the fate of a note,
though it too, is as final and as decisive
as death.