In This Valley - Yehuda Amichai

With this one, Amichai now has the most poems (5) thus far in this blog.  If you read the others - go to the side-bar and "click" his name under "Poets" - you will begin to get a feel for why.  To write well about Love, one must experience it.  To write with passion about Love, one must also experience its opposite: Loss.  Each is the necessary reference point by which to fully appreciate the other.  His poems are infused with that appreciation, of which a distinctive part is an urgency to live/love fully. Being an Israeli who fought in three wars will do that. 
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In This Valley

In this valley which many waters
carved out in endless years
so that the light breeze may now
pass through it to cool my forehead,
I think about you. From the hills I hear
voices of men and machines wrecking and building.

And there are loves which cannot
be moved to another site.
They must die at their place and in their time
like an old clumsy piece of furniture
that’s destroyed together with
the house in which it stands.

But this valley is a hope
of starting afresh without having to die first,
of loving without forgetting the other love,
of being like the breeze that passes through it now
without being destined for it.
                                                                                                 Yehuda Amichai -Israeli