46 WESTERN ASIA
In this chapter
- Geography and History
- Religion and Philosophy
- Literature
- Architecture
- Performing Arts
- Visual Arts
GEOGRAPHY and HISTORY
RELIGION and PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE
Yehuda Amichai (Palestinian/Israeli)
Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany and immigrated to Palestina in 1936. He served in the Jewish Brigade in World War II and fought in the Israel War of Independence in the Palmach. His writing draws from these autobiographical experiences. His work often explores war, family bonds, love, and disillusionment. His works “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for his Goat on Mount Zion” and “Jerusalem” are form his 1987 work Poems of Jerusalem. He explores contemporary Jewish experiences using language found in every life juxtaposed with language from epics and the Bible.
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Compact Anthonology of World Literature II. University of North Georgia Press. By Anita Turlington, Matthew Horton, Karen Dodson, Laura Getty, Kyounghye Kwon, Laura Ng
Three Poems
I. “A Precise Woman”
A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
then wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.
A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)
II. “An Arab Shepherd is Searching for his Goat on Mt. Zion”
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the “Had Gadya” machine.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
III. “My Father”
The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.
Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits
out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,
and the rivers of his hands
overflowed with good deeds.
“Three Jerusalem Poems”
Jerusalem
On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
a kite
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can’t see
because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that