The Diameter of the Bomb -- Yehuda Amichai

Guest poem sent in by Huat Chye Lim

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:

(Poem #1448) The Diameter of the Bomb 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