I passed by the school where I studied as a boy <br />and said in my heart: here I learned certain things <br />and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain <br />the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge, <br />I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge, <br />the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites. <br />I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil, <br />I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die. <br />I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room <br />where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open <br />to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape <br />we were seeing from the window. <br />The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones. <br />I remember the brief tumult of the two of us <br />near the rickety steps, the tumult <br />that was the beginning of a first great love. <br />Now it outlives us, as if in a museum, <br />like everything else in Jerusalem.<br /><br />Yehuda Amichai<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-school-where-i-studied/
