Today, a poem from Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), which encapsulates transitions from childhood to war to the pain of after, ending on a note of possibility:

Autobiography, 1952

• My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard
• and I left it once, before I was finished,
• and he remained there with his big, empty worry.
• and my mother was like a tree on the shore
• between her arms that stretched out toward me.
•  
• And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small
• and in ’41 they learned to use a gun
• and when I first fell in love
• my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
• and the girl’s white hand held them all
• by a thin string—then let them fly away.
•  
• And in ’51 the motion of my life
• was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship,
• and my father’s face like the headlight on the front of a train
• growing smaller and smaller in the distance,
• and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet,
• and as I walked up my street
• the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,
•  blood that wanted to get out in many wars
• and through many openings,
• that’s why it knocks against my head from the inside
• and reaches my heart in angry waves.
•  
• But now, in the spring of ’52, I see
• that more birds have returned than left last winter.
• And I walk back down the hill to my house.
• And in my room: the woman, whose body is heavy
• and filled with time.

– Yehuda Amichai

From The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, ©1986, 1996

Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

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