[1448] The Diameter of the Bomb

Guest poem sent in by Huat Chye Lim <huatchye@>

The Yehuda Amichai poem from a couple of weeks ago [Poem #1437] reminded me of
another poem of his that I really like and isn't in your anthology:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

 	-- Yehuda Amichai

	(translated by Chana Bloch)

Amichai starts with a recitation of cold, technical facts about the bomb--its
diameter, its range, the number of casualties.  But then, unexpectedly and
rather jarringly, he segues into a personal sketch of one of the victims and
her grieving lover, "the solitary man mourning her death / at the distant
shores of a country far across the sea"--two lines I find especially poignant.
Amichai's conversational, somewhat detached tone ("And I won't even
mention...") throughout the poem serves almost as a foil to the raw emotional
loss that the bomb wreaked, and emphasizes it all the more.

Cheers,
Huat Chye Lim

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