When did Yehuda Amichai write this poem? 1980s? 1990s? Yesterday? When will it all end? Will the last Palestinian try to kill the last Israeli, or will they say to one another, Can we stop here, and try to rebuild? When do two peoples-- relatives, if you can believe this; I have cousins who still wont speak to me because our dead parents didnt invite their dead parents to a party, decades ago; it had nothing to do with me-- finally say, This anger is eating me up inside. Let me give you one dunam, two, three, six dunams; raise your flag, build a house; just dont try to kill me and my family, OK? Maybe Ill send over a cake, once you get settled. And to have this man, this stranger, say, Oh, OK. Come over-- in a month, once we finish the garage. Well have coffee. Leave your guns at home, please. Ill tell my brother that, if he digs a tunnel, it will be to store only extra farming tools, plowshares and pruning hooks only. Anyway, heres the Amichai poem, if the coffee thing never happens: The Diameter of the Bomb The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I wont even mention the howl of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:40:50 +0000
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