POET'S CHOICE

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, February 18, 2007

To write about history is to write about forgetting: The historical account of any nation, family or lifetime must acknowledge gaps and omissions, violations and losses. Fragments must be honored as fragments. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) begins and ends his last collection, Open Closed Open, by considering an actual, physical fragment, "The Amen Stone":

On my desk there is a stone with the word "Amen" on it,

a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed

many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds,

were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning,

a longing without end, fills them all:

first name in search of family name, date of death seeks

dead man's birthplace, son's name wishes to locate

name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul

that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found

one another, they will not find perfect rest.

Only this stone lies calmly on my desk and says "Amen."

But now the fragments are gathered up in lovingkindness

by a sad good man. He cleanses them of every blemish,

photographs them one by one, arranges them on the floor

in the great hall, makes each gravestone whole again,

one again: fragment to fragment,

like the resurrection of the dead, a mosaic,

a jigsaw puzzle. Child's play.

The same stone fragment recurs in the middle of this carefully plotted book and then again in its final poem, "The Jewish Time Bomb." Brooding once more on the carved word of assent, Amichai extends it over epochs of suffering to the universal last day:

On my desk is a stone with "Amen" carved on it, one survivor fragment

of the thousands upon thousands of bits of broken tombstones

in Jewish graveyards. I know all these broken pieces

now fill the great Jewish time bomb

along with the other fragments and shrapnel, broken Tablets of the Law

broken altars broken crosses rusty crucifixion nails

broken houseware and holyware and broken bones

eyeglasses shoes prostheses false teeth

empty cans of lethal poison. All these broken pieces

fill the Jewish time bomb until the end of days.

And though I know about all this, and about the end of days,

the stone on my desk gives me peace.

It is the touchstone no one touches, more philosophical

than any philosopher's stone, broken stone from a broken tomb

more whole than any wholeness,

a stone of witness to what has always been

and what will always be, a stone of amen and love.

Amen, amen, and may it come to pass.

These two poems meditating on the same symbolic object offer variations on a profound theme, but with some playful turns. It's part of Amichai's syncretic genius, and his poise, that he can so dryly include Holocaust imagery such as the empty cans of lethal poison, the eyeglasses and the false teeth. The ironic, understated phrase "child's play" ends the first poem by denoting simplicity after invoking an infinity of loss. The simplicity that resolves the second poem, in its way also understated, is not ironic. Wholeheartedly, in the last words of his last book, Amichai joins the voices he hears in a triangle of graveyard stone, voicing the most traditional of words.

(Yehuda Amichai's poems "The Amen Stone" and "The Jewish Time Bomb" are from his book "Open Closed Open: Poems," translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kornfeld. Harvest. © 2000 by Yehuda Amichai. Translation © 2000 by Chana Bloch and Chana Kornfeld.)