“He felt Sonya’s entrance before he saw her, because over the last six weeks he had learned to pick out the smell of oranges even on a busy street.”

“…he can’t freeze the previous moment, the exact moment he ran him down, the moment a man driving an SUV ran down a man walking on the road.”

“Ezra, what would you call the story told by my violin?”… He said to Rahamim, “I would call it, The Dawning of the Day.”

“I ran outside to buy vaccines against tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio…, and I gave them to him all at once—though I knew you shouldn’t do this.”

“My father—the hammer poised above the plate, / My mother—the snake of love, / And I—a girl with a dick; / We set out on the path / traced with my tongue.”

“The boy is dead. I recognize these words as holding truth. He is dead, he is dead. But his death, his death is not dead.”

“How we flew – / Not from Gadera to Rehovot or up the Castel / en route to Jerusalem, like in those dreams, but / outside of the stratosphere…”

In honor of Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel – listen to the poetry of Paul Celan.

Today’s Passover-themed podcast is taken from Robert Alter’s new edition, “The Poems of Yehuda Amichai.”