Two years before his death, the poet Yehuda Amichai was interviewed on what was still known back then as Channel 1 in Israel.
The man who had devoted his life to the pursuit of peace attempted to describe what peace meant to him.
Spoiler alert: there are no wolves residing with lambs here, nor leopards sharing apartments with goats.
“I believe in the necessity of peace so deeply, that I want to lower it — lower the bar,” Amichai told interviewer Ram Evron. “The expectations should be to postpone the next war. Peace and love will come later, but first of all — postpone the next war.”
Moreover, Amichai’s peace was completely alien to ceremonies and formal agreements. “Because if you make too many performances and praises and celebrations and embraces out of peace,” he explained in the interview, “people will lose patience and a new war will begin. Postponing the next war — that is the most important thing. The loftier things will come afterward, on their own.”
And here, as I understand it, lies the message the poet conveys in “Wildpeace.” This “wildpeace” is a different kind of peace — a “natural” peace, a peace devoid of ceremony and without fanfare. A “light” peace.
A bit of historical background: On Friday, August 7, 1970, the War of Attrition officially came to an end. It was a conflict that stretched over three years between Israel and neighboring countries, often at low intensity, but it still managed to claim thousands of lives.
There was no actual peace here.
It was merely a pause in the fighting — one that, as we know in retrospect, would last only until the next campaign in October, 1973: the Yom Kippur War.
And then, less than two months later, Yehuda Amichai published the first version of “Wildpeace” in Haaretz.
Wildpeace
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.
Translation by Chana Bloch
Is the proximity in time between the end of that war and the publication of this poem entirely coincidental? Did that lull, after years of warfare, finally offer “rest for the wounds”? Does the word “cease-fire” in the opening line refer to the ceasefire that ended the War of Attrition? I do not like to interpret poems. I will leave that to you, the readers.
A few months later, in 1971, Amichai published the poem again in his book But Not in Order to Remember. This final version now included the line: “And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say, Mama.”
The years pass. In fact, twenty-three years pass before the poem returns to the headlines.
Yehuda Amichai received a special invitation from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — an invitation to join him at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, held on December 10, 1994. Amichai, a man identified with the peace camp, accepted the invitation. He participated in the ceremony and read to the audience from his poems, including “Wildpeace.”
And perhaps there was something faintly jarring about it.
For while Amichai speaks in the poem of peace “without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp” used in official treaties, in reality he was participating in a prize ceremony honoring leaders who had signed exactly these types of agreements with precisely these types of stamps.
But Amichai provided an answer for that as well.
When asked about his choice of the poem “Wildpeace,” he replied:
“I wrote this poem more than twenty years ago, before the first peace treaty with Egypt. At that time peace was only a vision. History has taught us that life is too short to wait for natural peace. Nature has to be helped and protected like wildflowers. That is what the leaders of the two nations are doing now with great courage.”
Another thirty-two years pass, and the poem once again returns to the headlines. This time, before an audience of billions, when the Pope himself quotes the poem in his Christmas sermon at the Vatican. We were left only slightly disappointed that Leo XIV did not mention Amichai by name.
Two months later, the poem transitioned from the realm of Catholic liturgy into the world of rock and roll, when the iconic Irish band U2 featured it on their latest EP, Days of Ash.
“For me,” Hanna Amichai, Yehuda’s widow, tells us, “‘Wildpeace’ is a peace that grows naturally, on its own — like a flower. Not something planted, cultivated, or engineered.”
“In my lifetime, I no longer expect ‘wildpeace’ to be fulfilled,” Hanna admits. “But perhaps it is still worth believing. Who knows?”
