AVIYA KUSHNER
How One Nation Mourns a Poet
Y
EHUDA AMICHAI DIED
ON
AFRIDAY, the day when Jerusalem, his
home city and his muse, busies itself preparing for Shabbat.
Tomatoes, chickens, and challah bread fill the plastic bags peo–
ple carry from the
shuk,
the open-air market. Fresh food is transported
on the bus, the bags balanced on knees squeezed into the narrow red
seats-if one is lucky enough to get a seat-and then slowly carried up
the stairs back home. White shirts and pressed black hats color the city
at night, and after the wail of the siren announces sundown, the sounds
of the Friday night welcoming-the-Shabbat service-come
in, bride,
come in, bride-eventually
ring from the synagogues.
Friday is not a good day for death, but all day the airwaves crackled
with Amichai's poems. On the bus, people mouthed the words they
knew. The funeral would have to wait until after the holy day, but the
words didn't wait:
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
At this point I heard sobs on the bus. But the poem continued :
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.
These are words every Israeli knows by heart, words people went to
war with and buried sons with. Those lines resonate because Israelis
know too well that leaving school often means going to war, and some–
times going to death. Amichai gave that terrible truth form.
But Amichai also supplied words to make love to-words many have
told me they love because they are so plainly about love. Even at his
