Shut Unsealed Shut

On May 4, 2011 the Confederation House across the Mount Zion with its huge Catholic monastery's bell tower features "Love Poems of Yehuda Amichai.” There is a “tangible” connection between the long dead poet beloved by the Hebrew Republic's reading classes and myself. Years ago we both frequented the Phoenician coast where Yehuda wrote his lustful poems and he devoted some lines to Eli Avivi, the monarch of Akhzivland, the mini-state requiring special visas. I was admitted there too and even got a permit to work under His Highness's direction. This time I cannot make it from my Galilean Jerusalem-like hideout to the Babylon of modern Jerusalem. I am failing to attend the event but Amichai's latest book masterfully translated by Chana Bloch is in my hands.

Its title is "Open Closed Open." The author fashions a “Kabbalistic” construct of Prebirth, Life and Afterlife.

Prebirth and Afterlife are full of opportunities and thus open. Yet our short existence on this planet is stifling.

I disagree, o Yehuda!

Before birth everything is closed! This world and our births are accidents.

During our lifetimes everything is open.

More than that, as Kira Sapguir of Moscow and Paris puts it, "While we are alive we are immortal."

After death everything is closed. Forever and ever. As if we have never lived at all.

No loopholes, Yehuda!

Your writings are lingering a bit in print, Yehuda, because people are merciful.

For a while.

summer dusk . . .
the Galilee mosque's blue light
turns its true green