July 13, 2026

When he loses he seeks, when he finds he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves he begins to forget.

Yehuda Amichai wrote this poem in the decades after surviving combat in World War II and the wars of the young State of Israel, when loss was woven into ordinary life. In it he argues against the book of Ecclesiastes, insisting that grief and love, seeking and forgetting, do not come in separate seasons but arrive tangled together, all at once. Amichai lost friends in battle and lived through years of conflict, and his poetry keeps returning to how people carry sorrow while still working, loving, and getting through the day. The line speaks to grief now because it refuses the idea of tidy stages, showing instead that missing someone and moving forward can happen in the very same breath.