You visit me inside the apple.
Together we can hear the knife
paring around and around us, carefully,
so the peel won’t tear.
You speak to me. I trust your voice
because it has lumps of hard pain in it
the way real honey
has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.
I touch your lips with my fingers:
that too is a prophetic gesture.
And your lips are red, the way a burnt field
is black.
It’s all true.
You visit me inside the apple
and you’ll stay with me inside the apple
until the knife finishes its work.
Yehuda Amichai
trans. by Chana Bloch
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1996)
THE POETRY PLACE 