Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms

By Yehuda Amichai

Close scrutiny of the past.
How my soul yearns within me like those souls
in the nineteenth century before the great wars,
like curtains that want to pull free
of the open window and fly.

We console ourselves with short breaths,
as, after running, we always recover.
We want to reach death hale and hearty,
like a murderer sentenced to death,
wounded when he was caught,
whose judges want him to heal before
he’s brought to the gallows.

I think, how many still waters
can yield a single night of stillness
and how many green pastures, wide as deserts,
can yield the quiet of a single hour
and how many valleys of the shadow of death do we need
to be a compassionate shade in the unrelenting sun.

I look out the window: a hundred and fifty
psalms pass through the twilight,
a hundred and fifty psalms, great and small.
What a grand and glorious and transient fleet!

I say: the window is God
And the door is his prophet.


Previousy published in The New Yorker, July 28, 2008