Showing posts with label Yehudi Amichai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yehudi Amichai. Show all posts

Saturday, March 29, 2025

behind all this,

 


some great happiness is hiding.
~ Yehuda Amichai








I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me

It extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me

there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me

the only presence that appears to stay 
everything that I call mine it lent me

even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me





~ W. S. Merwin
found in The Shadow of Sirius 


Tuesday, November 20, 2018

doubts and loves







From the place where we are right 
Flowers will never grow 
In the spring. 

The place where we are right 
Is hard and trampled 
Like a yard. 

But doubts and loves 
Dig up the world 
Like a mole, a plow. 

And a whisper will be heard in the place 
Where the ruined 
House once stood. 







~ Yehudi Amichai

(from: The Selected Poetry of Yehudi Amichai
translation by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)
photo by Eliot Porter.