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Poetry

Wishing…

Wishing everyone a peaceful Christmas and 2024.

I want to share this poem, recently posted on WriteOutLoud, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, which was published in his 1971 collection Not for the Sake of Remembering, a few years after the 1967 Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In 1994, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestinian National Authority, and Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres. Amichai was invited to participate in the prizegiving ceremony, where he read this poem:

WILDPEACE

Not the peace of a cease-fire

not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,

but rather

as in the heart when the excitement is over

and you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be

light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation

to the next, as in a relay race:

the baton never falls.)

Let it come

like wildflowers,

suddenly, because the field

must have it: wildpeace.

Yehuda Amichai

Translated by Chana Bloch

By Chris

Poet and writer: I have travelled the world in the Merchant Navy, worked on the farm where I now live, and re-invented myself as an information scientist. Born in Sussex, I moved to Swansea and have lived in the same farm cottage in mid-Wales for almost 50 years.

I have two collections of poems in print, Mostly Welsh and the recent Book of the Spirit. Although initially entirely focussed on poetry, my writing has branched into short stories and my first full length work of fiction, The Dark Trilogy and the collection of short stories - When I Am Not Writing Poetry - are also available.

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