My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.
I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature-is comparative time.
And I said to myself: That’s true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.
Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.
God has pity on kindergarten children.
And what will you do now? You’ll collect loves Like stamps. You’ve got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.
The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
I was a very religious child – I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good – I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.
It was not an adventure; it was my life.
Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That’s why my feelings always come in twos.
Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not – a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist – possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.
Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn’t know what the light is or where it comes from.
The echo of a great love is like the echo of a huge dog’s barking in an empty Jerusalem house marked for demolition.
I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey.
My love turns me like a salt sea, it seems, Into sweet drops of autumn’s first rain. I’m brought to you slowly as I fall. Take me in. For us there’s no angel who will come to redeem. For we are together. Each of us alone.
A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don’t go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God’s slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.