1198. North of San Francisco - Yehuda Amichai

 

    Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Blochr

Here the soft hills touch the ocean

like one eternity touching another

and the cows grazing on them

ignore us, like angels.

Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar

is a prophecy of peace. 

The darkness does not war against the light,

it carries forward

to another light, and the only pain

is the pain of not staying. 

In my land, called holy,

they wont’t let eternity be:

they’ve divided it into little religions

zoned it for god-zones,

broken it into fragments of history,

sharp and wounding until death.

and they’ve turned in tranquil distances

into a closeness convulsing with the pain of the present.

On the beach at Bolinas, at the foot of the wooden steps,

I saw some girls lying in the sand bare-bottomed.

their heads bowed, drunk

on the kingdom everlasting,

their souls like doors

closing and opening inside them

to the rhythm of the surf.

1197. A Man and a Woman Sit Near Each Other - Robert Bly

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long

at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born

in any other nation, or time, or place.

They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.

Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.

The man sees the way his fingers move,

he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.

They obey a third body that they share in common.

They make a promise to love that body.

Age may come, parting may come, death will come.

A man and a woman sit near each other;

as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,

someone we know of, whom we have never seen.