Yehuda Amichai poetry

I love NPR and I love too that they have a way of communicating every story with so much heart and something that like pixey dust has the ability to transport me to another place and into another's shoes. NPR just covered a story about the poetry of Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai. His poetry is open and honest, and I found it to be an entirely appropriate thing to be reading this gloomy, rainy day. So I will share.

"Try to remember some details"
Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing of the one you love so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat. Try to remember some details. For they have no face and their soul is hidden and their crying is the same as their laughter, and their silence and their shouting rise to one height and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees and they have no life outside this narrow space and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing and paper cups that are used once only. Try to remember some details. For the world is filled with people who were torn from their sleep with no one to mend the tear, and unlike wild beasts they live each in his lonely hiding place and they die together on battlefields and in hospitals. And the earth will swallow all of them, good and evil together, like the followers of Korah, all of them in thir rebellion against death, their mouths open till the last moment, praising and cursing in a single howl. Try, try to remember some details.

"A Man in his life"
A man doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn't have seasons enough to havea season for every purpose. EcclesiastesWas wrong about that.A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, to laugh and cry with the same eyes, with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,to make love in war and war in love. And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digestwhat history takes years and years to do. A man doesn't have time. When he loses he seeks, when he findshe forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loveshe begins to forget. And his soul is seasoned, his soulis very professional. Only his body remains foreveran amateur. It tries and it misses,gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains. He will die as figs die in autumn, Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,the leaves growing dry on the ground,the bare branches pointing to the placewhere there's time for everything.