Yehuda Amichai

Wildpeace

Wildpeace - meaning Summary

Peace as Weary Intimacy

Amichai rejects grand or ideological peace and imagines a quiet, ordinary truce that follows exhaustion rather than victory. The poem contrasts adult knowledge of killing with a child’s toy gun and the inherited howl of orphans, suggesting violence and grief pass between generations. Instead of proclamations or ceremonial conversions of weapons, peace arrives softly and unexpectedly, like wildflowers on a field—fragile, natural, and necessary rather than triumphant.

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Not the peace of a cease-fire not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.) Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.