Temporary Poem Of My Time - Analysis

Writing Direction as a First Wound

The poem begins with something that seems merely factual: Hebrew and Arabic move from east to west, Latin from west to east. But this small observation becomes the poem’s first argument about the land: even the basic act of reading carries a built-in counter-movement. The speaker turns that difference into a warning by way of a homely metaphor: Languages are like cats; stroke them the wrong way and you invite resistance. That line quietly sets the tone for what follows: in this place, even touch can turn into injury, even meaning can bristle. The poem’s central claim starts to appear here: in a land crowded with histories and tongues, the most ordinary directions—of script, wind, and gesture—become contested forces, and the body pays for it.

Land That Cannot Be Thrown Away

The next movement expands the directionality outward into weather and geography: clouds come from the sea, hot wind from the desert, trees bend. The world is already a system of pressures. Then the poem turns—almost inevitably—to stones: stones fly from all four winds. That image is both literal and mythic. Stones are projectiles, but they are also the land itself in motion, pieces of earth used as weapons.

The crucial contradiction arrives in the blunt paradox: They throw this land at each other, But the land always falls back. People try to hurl the land away—want to get rid of it—yet it returns by gravity and by fate. This is one of Amichai’s sharpest griefs here: violence pretends to be an exit, but the land is inescapable. You can throw its stones and soil, but you can’t get rid of it. The poem suggests that the conflict is not only over territory; it is also the terrible impossibility of separating oneself from it.

The Litany of Years: One Body Hit Again

When the speaker says They throw stones at me and then lists 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988, the poem becomes a personal chronicle of repeated impact. The years are not explained, and that refusal matters: the list works like bruises—markers of recurrence rather than a tidy lesson. The poem’s voice tightens into a grim, almost bureaucratic accumulation, as if to say that suffering has learned to count.

The following lines widen blame until it becomes almost absurd: Semites throw at Semites, evil men and just men, sinners and tempters, even geologists and theologists. The effect is not neutrality; it is despair at the way every category becomes a throwing arm. Even scholarship is pulled into the violence, turning the ground into an argument that can be lifted and hurled. The punning pair Archaelogists and archhooligans makes the point especially bitter: excavation and vandalism start to rhyme because both disturb the same layered earth.

Stones as Body, Tools, and Time

The poem then pushes the stone image into grotesque intimacy: Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw. Here the land’s violence enters the body; stone-throwing becomes illness, involuntary pain. The speaker multiplies types of stones—head stones, forehead stones, heart of a stone—until stone is no longer an object but a condition: hardness, deadness, impact, obstruction.

Yet the poem refuses to let stones be only weapons. Some stones are shaped like expression—a screaming mouth; some are fitted to perception—like a pair of glasses. In other words, stones also become language and sight, the very means by which people testify and interpret. This is a key tension: the same material that builds understanding can also break skulls. The poet makes that tension historical and philosophical when the past throws stones at the future and they land on the present. The present is not a free moment; it is the place where inherited force lands.

Biblical Throwing and the Irony of Justice

The speaker intensifies the burden by bringing God and sacred history into the throwing: Even God in the Bible threw stones. The mention of the Urim and Tumim—were thrown and stuck in the breastplate of justice—is especially painful. It imagines justice itself as something decided by casting objects, by a kind of sanctified randomness. The poem does not mock belief so much as expose how deeply this culture’s sacred imagination is entangled with the gesture of throwing.

Then comes Herod: threw stones and what came out was a Temple. That line stings because it confuses creation with coercion. A temple is beautiful, but here it is the product of thrown stones—force, labor, domination. The poem’s world cannot keep building and violence separate; stones cross the boundary back and forth, and the speaker stands in the middle.

The Lament: Is Any Stone Innocent?

The triple cry—Oh, the poem of stone sadness, thrown on the stones, thrown stones—is the poem’s emotional crest. It’s as if the speaker admits that even writing is caught in the same motion: a poem is also something hurled, landing where it may. The question that follows is devastating in its precision: Is there in this land / A stone that was never thrown—and then the list expands: never built, never overturned, never uncovered, never discarded by the builders, never closed on top of a grave, never lay under lovers. Each clause is a different human use: war, architecture, archaeology, burial, intimacy. The poem implies there is no pure material left; everything has been handled, repurposed, consecrated, violated. Even love lies under stone, as if tenderness can’t escape the weight of history.

A Hard Question the Poem Forces

If no stone is unthrown, then what would peace even rest on? The speaker’s question suggests that innocence is not merely rare but structurally impossible here: every cornerstone already carries the memory of being a missile, every discovered stone the trace of being buried or used.

From Protest to Strange Negotiation with the Sea

After the lament, the voice shifts into pleading: Please do not throw any more stones. The speaker now describes the cumulative violence as geological displacement: You are moving the land, pushing it to the sea. The land is called holy, whole, open, three words that argue with one another. Holy invokes possession and reverence, whole longs for integrity, open suggests porousness and vulnerability. The plea implies that continual throwing does not defend the land; it erodes and relocates it.

The sea’s refusal—the sea doesn’t want it, not in me—is an eerie personification. Nature becomes a judge tired of human dumping. The sea will not be made into a moral landfill for other people’s irreconcilable claims.

Throwing Toward Exhaustion: A Wish Without Illusions

The poem ends by revising its own central verb. If people insist on throwing, the speaker asks them to throw what cannot kill: little stones, snail fossils, gravel, soft stones, sweet clods, then finally air and nothing. It is a haunting, almost impossible program: redirect the impulse until it runs out.

The closing vision is not triumphant; it is deliberately weary: Until your hands are weary, and the war is weary, and even peace will be weary. Peace here is not a shining resolution but a state that may arrive only after exhaustion, when the throwing arm finally fails. The poem’s last honesty is that in this land, even peace may feel like fatigue—not because it is worthless, but because the body that reaches it has been struck for decades, and because the stones, once lifted, are hard to set down.