It's Been a While Since They Asked
Translated By Chana Bloch
It's been a while since they asked, Who lives in between these
houses,
And who was he, the last of the last to speak,
And who forgot his coat between these houses,
And who was the one who stayed. Why didn't he flee?
Among the blossomers, a dead tree stands, dead tree.
A long-standing error, a misunderstanding of yore,
The edge of the Land, where an era begins to be
For somebody else. A bit of stillness there.
And the current events of body and of hell,
The reeds of the end, their spells of sway and sough.
The wind passed on its way through that locale
And a serious dog saw the humans laugh.
Copyright Credit: Yehuda Amichai, "It’s Been a While Since They Asked" from The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Copyright © 2015 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of Hana Amichai.
Source: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015)