The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House in Jerusalem – Yehuda Amichai

The mediators, the peacemakers,
the compromise-shapers, the comforters
live in the white house
and get their nourishment from far away,
through winding pipes,
through dark veins,
like a fetus.
Their secretaries are lip sticked and laughing.
Their sturdy chauffeurs wait below,
like horses in a stable,
and the trees that shade them
have their roots in no-man’s land
and the illusions are children
who went out to find cyclamen
and did not come back.

My thoughts pass overhead,
restless, like reconnaissance planes,
and take photos
and develop them in dark sad rooms.

And I know they have heavy chandeliers
and the boy-I-was sits on them
and swings out and back,
out and back,
out till there’s no coming back.

Later on night will arrive
to draw rusty and bent conclusions
from our old lives,
and over all the houses
a melody will gather the scattered word
like a hand gathering crumbs
upon a table after the meal,
when the talk continues
and the children are asleep.
And hopes come to me like bold seafarers,
like the discoverers of continents coming to an island,
and stay for a day or two and rest…
And then again set sail.

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