Yad Mordechai

Portrait of Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai 1924–2000

Yad Mordechai. Those who fell here still look out the windows like sick children who are not allowed outside to play. And on the hillside, the battle is reenacted for the benefit of hikers and tourists. Soldiers of thin sheet iron rise and fall and rise again. Sheet iron dead and a sheet iron life and the voices all—sheet iron. And the resurrection of the dead, sheet iron that clangs and clangs.

And I said to myself: Everyone is attached to his own lament as to a parachute. Slowly he descends and slowly hovers until he touches the hard place.

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