Amen

Short commentary on Amichai’s poem I posted yesterday:

What one can imagine to be a billet-doux by the woman has turned into a question and a prayer. The street on a summer evening is now the western wall, remainder of the destroyed temple, where petitioners slip small folded scraps of paper into the cracks of the stones. The locked door is this impenetrable wall which separates the world into the two irreconcilable spheres of the living and the dead. A message in the form of a reminder, command or objurgation already sticks to it, though rolled and locked, not folded: the mezuzah. The faces of the woman or man are invisible to the urban moses and poet who has abandoned a certain religious life but still climbs daily sinais in the hope of catching a glimpse of a reality beyond words, yet never sees face to face, not even what is written on the piece of paper. What is written: scripture, the writings, or inscriptions on tombstones, to be revealed later in an oral torah of sorts, conversations, reminiscences and poems, and to be enshrined or entombed on doors, hands, and foreheads, inside wallets or diaries and history books.
Entombed lives are marked by erect stones that erode, fracture, or are broken, even desecrated. The single word “I believe” is enough to remember them. An amen of endurance and permanence. From within that firm assurance and singular ground of trust in a promise, before that inscribed mute stone, the poet writes on the paper laid out flat on his table. No matter where he turns, the words are carved deep in the heart, echoes and reminders of what was and cannot return except in this enduring acceptance of a language, a history, a people. From within that single declaration of fierce trust and humble acceptance, a soft song rises. Acceptance of a will, it doesn’t say whose but I make it mine. Everything passes, humans and their languages and inscribed stones. New languages come into being and resurrect from the dead, wholly other, yet heirs to promise and trust. New tongues, new lips that build an eternity with love letters.