After Blacksburg, I am Without Words

#36

I am like a leaf that knows its limits
And doesn't want to extend beyond them,
Not to bend with nature, not to flow into the big world.

I am so quiet now that
I can't imagine
I ever shouted, even as a baby in pain.

And my face, what is left
After they hewed it for love,
Like a quarry. Now abandoned.



-Yehuda Amichai, from "Time" (1978)
in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 (HarperCollins, 1994).