Drawn to Amichai

I am compelled to Amichai's poetry. I find myself drawn to read and reread the words, the lines, the stanzas. Mainly politically themed, Amichai expresses his view of his world through simple words, easily imagined, and painted so directly that I can imagine myself amongst the words of his poems as I am reading them. The intrigue, for me, of Amichai's poems that set him apart from some of the others is that he writes so seemingly effortlessly that each poem can carry with it double meanings: the literal and the abstract. While he writes slightly historically about the everyday sights of war and its aftermath, evoking inside the reader the very same emotions as the subjects of his poems, Amichai still encourages timeless metaphoric readings of his work.

While I am quite fond of all of his poems I have read thus far, my marked favorites are "Of Three and Four in a Room," "Jerusalem," "Tourists," and "Endless Poem" which is not in our textbook. With the exception perhaps of 'Of Three or Four in a Room," Amichai writes with an ardent sense of nationality, pride, and heritage in these other poems, though not arrogantly as can sometimes be the case when writers are recording national historic events.

In "Jerusalem" Amichai refers to his "enemy" and yet he portrays them as the same as himself. The last stanza seems almost to sympathize with the "other" side because of the empathetic relationship they share. They are two sides of the same coin.

"Tourists" draws in me a sense of shame. We discussed this poem rather heavily in class so I do not wish to reverberate that, but I did want to add that part "2" very bluntly and undeniably drives home Amichai's purpose in writing it. The example Amichai gives of the tourists who are pointing, using the man as a point of reference to the historical object, when instead they should be using the historical object as a point of reference to guide their sight to the people, is incredibly moving. Instead of focusing on the shrines and memorials, they should be nothing more than the guide which directs our sight instead to the fellow beings who endured the historical and catastrophic events. Instead of being caught up in learning the history of facts, we should be more compelled to learning sympathy and compassion in a very real sense for the people exploited in the creation of the monuments to history. History occurs only because of the people it impacts.