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| photo: celia g. |
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose.
Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur.
It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
Written by Yehuda Amichai *
«Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical
issues of the meaning of life and death. His work is characterized by gentle
irony and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets,
he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and
the religious experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a
post-theological humanism. Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability
for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys
and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."» (en.wikipedia.org)
