Friday, May 27, 2005
An Anti-War Poem by Yehuda Amichai
"A POEM THAT I WROTE IN A HIGH FEVER"
You who are lengthening your lives
with the best doctors and best medicines
remember those who are shortening their lives
with the war
that you in your long lives are not
preventing.
You who are again screwing
the younger generations
and winking at each other
the winking of your eyelids
is like chill of the swinging shutters
in an empty house.
---Yehuda Amichai (translated from Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier)
So far in May,Sixtysix (66) American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq...and there are 4 more days before the month ends. Patriots or cannon fodder? You decide. My mind was made up long before the first pair of boots hit the ground.
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Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany. He moved to Israel at the age of 12 and lived there until his death.
"In Amichai one almost always encounters a delight in figurative language; yet his poems are never pretentious or tedious, since they speak out of the everyday and towards concerns we encounter every day. His great themes are love and loss: he celebrates life with vibrancy and energy and a relish for feeling, yet at the same time he is intensely aware of what is lost as history, both personal and social, shears away from each individual things he or she holds dear."
Link:
UVM-Amichai
You who are lengthening your lives
with the best doctors and best medicines
remember those who are shortening their lives
with the war
that you in your long lives are not
preventing.
You who are again screwing
the younger generations
and winking at each other
the winking of your eyelids
is like chill of the swinging shutters
in an empty house.
---Yehuda Amichai (translated from Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier)
So far in May,Sixtysix (66) American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq...and there are 4 more days before the month ends. Patriots or cannon fodder? You decide. My mind was made up long before the first pair of boots hit the ground.
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany. He moved to Israel at the age of 12 and lived there until his death.
"In Amichai one almost always encounters a delight in figurative language; yet his poems are never pretentious or tedious, since they speak out of the everyday and towards concerns we encounter every day. His great themes are love and loss: he celebrates life with vibrancy and energy and a relish for feeling, yet at the same time he is intensely aware of what is lost as history, both personal and social, shears away from each individual things he or she holds dear."
Link:
UVM-Amichai
