Yad Mordechai
Yad Mordechai - context Summary
Battle of Yad Mordechai
This poem reflects on the Battle of Yad Mordechai and on how wartime sacrifice is memorialized. Amichai contrasts living grief with the staged reenactments and metal figures that clang like a hollow resurrection. The poem registers how memory and public commemoration can become artificial, while private mourning remains weighty and inevitable, likened to a parachute that slows descent until it meets a hard reality.
Read Complete AnalysesYad Mordechai. Those who fell here still look out the windows like sick children who are not allowed outside to play. And on the hillside, the battle is reenacted for the benefit of hikers and tourists. Soldiers of thin sheet iron rise and fall and rise again. Sheet iron dead and a sheet iron life and the voices all—sheet iron. And the resurrection of the dead, sheet iron that clangs and clangs. And I said to myself: Everyone is attached to his own lament as to a parachute. Slowly he descends and slowly hovers until he touches the hard place.
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