Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is widely regarded as one of the most important modern Hebrew poets, known for transforming everyday language into deeply philosophical and emotional poetry. His poems speak in a calm, conversational tone, yet beneath that simplicity lies a profound exploration of love, war, faith, memory, and loss.
One of Amichai’s greatest strengths is his ability to blend the personal with the historical. As a poet who lived through war and the founding of Israel, he often writes about conflict—not in heroic terms, but through intimate moments: a lover’s body, a childhood memory, a quiet street after violence. War in his poems feels human, fragile, and painfully ordinary.
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| Yehuda amichai |
Amichai also reimagines religious language. Drawing from the Bible, Jewish prayers, and sacred imagery, he reshapes them to express doubt, longing, and irony. God in his poems is sometimes absent, sometimes intimate, sometimes questioned—reflecting the modern struggle between faith and skepticism.
Love is another central theme. His love poems are tender but unsentimental, aware of time, separation, and mortality. He often compares love to geography, ruins, or archaeology—something beautiful yet marked by history.
Yehuda Amichai’s poetry feels timeless because it speaks softly about the hardest truths of human life, making pain, love, and memory feel shared rather than solitary.
Try To Remember Some Details
Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
Try to remember some details. For they have no face
and their soul is hidden and their crying
is the same as their laughter,
and their silence and their shouting rise to one height
and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees
and they have no life outside this narrow space
and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory
and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing
and paper cups that are used once only.
Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details.
A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplace made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered above the earth.
We even flew a little.
Near The Wall Of A House
Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.
A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.
And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.
Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.
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 won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
God Full Of Mercy
God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.
I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.
A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life
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.
A Dog After Love
After you left me
I let a dog smell at
My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose
And set out to find you.
I hope it will tear the
Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis
Quick And Bitter
The end was quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet was the time between us,
slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair but in the love
of your body which came
between them.
And when I entered into you
it seemed then that great happiness
could be measured with precision
of sharp pain. Quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet were the nights.
Now is bitter and grinding as sand—
"Let's be sensible" and similiar curses.
And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences so long and orderly.
Had we remained together
we could have become a silence.
Or at least
