on Rabbi Kook's Street
by Yehuda Amichai
- On Rabbi Kook's Street
- I walk without this good man -
- A streiml he wore for prayer
- A silk top hat he wore to govern,
- fly in the wind of the dead
- above me, float on the water
- of my dreams.
- I come to the Street of Prophets - there are none.
- And the Street of Ethiopians - there are a few. I'm
- looking for a place for you to live after me
- padding your solitary nest for you,
- setting up the place of my pain with the sweat of my brow
- examining the road on which you'll return
- and the window of your room, the gaping wound,
- between closed and opened, between light and dark.
- There are smells of baking from inside the shanty,
- there's a shop where they distribute Bibles free,
- free, free. More than one prophet
- has left this tangle of lanes
- while everything topples above him and he becomes someone else.
- On Rabbi Kook's street I walk
- - your bed on my back like a cross -
- though it's hard to believe
- a woman's bed will become the symbol of a new religion.