The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
 and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
 with four dead and eleven wounded.
 And around these, in a larger circle
 of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
 and one graveyard. But the young woman
 who was buried in the city she came from,
 at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
 enlarges the circle considerably,
 and the solitary man mourning her death
 at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
 includes the entire world in the circle.
 And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
 that reaches up to the throne of God and
 beyond, making
 a circle with no end and no God.

The Yehuda Amichai poem from a couple of weeks ago [Poem #1437] reminded me of another poem of his that I really like and isn’t in your anthology:

(translated by Chana Bloch)

Amichai starts with a recitation of cold, technical facts about the bomb–its diameter, its range, the number of casualties. But then, unexpectedly and rather jarringly, he segues into a personal sketch of one of the victims and her grieving lover, “the solitary man mourning her death / at the distant shores of a country far across the sea”–two lines I find especially poignant. Amichai’s conversational, somewhat detached tone (“And I won’t even mention…”) throughout the poem serves almost as a foil to the raw emotional loss that the bomb wreaked, and emphasizes it all the more.

Cheers,
Huat Chye Lim