From the Hebrew: Karen Alkalay-Gut

They closed the port at Jaffa.

My beloved, close the portals of the sea!

In my youth they dressed me on the Sabbath

in a sailor blouse over my four-cornered fringe

and a sailor hat on my head.

My ancestors did not think of the sea and its ships.

Now you close the sea and its doors.

The warehouses are empty. My beloved is with me.

In the evening sadness someone said suddenly, “Women

whose voices are hoarse love more.” Don’t analyze,

don’t explain these words.

Close the portals of the sea.

On Rabbi Kook’s Street

I walk without this good man—

A streiml he wore for prayer

A silk top hat he wore to govern

fly in the wind of the dead

above me, float on the water

of my dreams.

I come to the Street of Prophets—there are none.

And the Street of Ethiopians—there are a few. I’m

looking for a place for you to live after me

padding your solitary nest for you,

setting up the place of my pain with the sweat of my brow

examining the road on which you’ll return

and the window of your room, the gaping wound,

between closed and opened, between light and dark.

There are smells of baking from inside the shanty,

there’s a shop where they distribute Bibles free,

free, free. More than one prophet

has left this tangle of lanes

while everything topples above him and he becomes someone else.

On Rabbi Kook’s street I walk

-- your bed on my back like a cross—

though it’s hard to believe

a woman’s bed will become the symbol of a new religion.

I sit in the waiting room with other grooms

younger than me by many years. If I lived in olden times

I’d be a prophet. But now I wait quietly

to register my name with my love in the big book

of marriage and respond to questions I can still

answer. I have filled up my life with words,

have gathered in my body enough information to support

the secret services of several countries.

With heavy steps I bear light thoughts:

As in my youth when I bfate—heavy thoughts on light feet

--almost dancing from so much future.

The pressures of my life bring the date of birth closer

to the date of death, as in history books,

where the pressures of history affixed these two

numbers together next to the name of a dead king,

and only a dash separates them.

I hold onto this dash with all my might.

Like a lifeline, I live by it

with a vow—not to be alone—on my lips,

the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride

the voice of rejoicing children outside Jerusalem

and the towns of Judea.

I guard the children in the school-yard.

The dog is part of me, I hear

the echoes of his barking from within.

And the shouts of children, like wild birds

rise up. Not even one shout

will return to the mouth it emerged from.

I am an old father guarding instead of the great God

who is eternally primping with His eternal youth.

During the Holocaust, I ask myself, did

son rebel against father? Did father beat

son between the barbed wire fences?

Was there quarrel between mother and daughter

in the annihilation shacks?

A disloyal and defiant son in the transport cars?

A generation gap on the platforms of the abyss?

Oedipus in the Death Cells?

I guard the children in their games.

And sometimes the ball bounces over the wall

and bounces and bounces down from yard to yard

and rolls into another reality.

But I lift my face and see above us,

as in a terrible vision, the bearers of dominion,

the exalted in honor, vowing and boasting,

the clerks of war, the dealers of peace

the treasurers of fate—ministers and presidents

decorated with multi-colored responsibility.

I see them skipping over us

like the angels in the plague of the first-borns’ death.

And their groins yawning, dripping

with the filth of nectars, like sweetened motor oil

and their soles crushing like the feet of the Demon,

and their heads in the sky, stupid as flags.

I have to pay money for entrance

to a place where I have memories

of wonderful things that happened to me in the past:

this is the distance of years, that is the love of country

and this is my life.

A waterfall of joy into the pool of sadness,

so simple and easy: sound and froth.

And the big stone where nearby we made a campfire

has remained black. Thus it remembers,

and this is the color of its remembrance.

So I threw away the admission ticket,

and called the place, Chambers.

Now she’s breathing quietly, I said. No, now

she is screaming from within in great pain, said the doctor. He

asked my permission to remove the wedding ring from her finger,

because it was very swollen. I gave permission because of her pain and because

my father never left her alone in his life. We twisted

the ring as if it were a magic ring in legends, but

it didn’t come off and no miracle occurred. The doctor asked

permission to cut off the ring and he cut it off with the delicacy

of careful tongs.

Now she is laughing, she is practicing the laughter of there.

Now she is crying, she is outgrowing the tears of here.

Her passport photo was taken many many years ago.

She hasn’t travelled abroad since she arrived

in the land of Israel. A death certificate

doesn’t require a photograph.

The jasmine flowers have broken the rules of night

and the sound of rotating sprinklers the summer.

Thigh, thigh, hand, hand—

thus is the dirge of lovers still together.

The sunset shows them

the possibilities of other lives.

Like a cleft between two forests, so is their sleep,

exposed and empty and secure from fire

But in the morning, immediate questions instead of blessings:

Even the cries of surprise are questions:

How goodly, how great are thy deeds, what will be?

We did what was expected of us.

We went out with our children

to pick mushrooms in the same for

we’d planted when we were children.

We learned the names of wild flowers

whose smell was as sweet

as senselessly spilt blood.

We put great love into small bodies.

We stood alternately enlarged and diminished

in the eyes of the mad, divine bearer of binoculars.

And in the war between light and darkness

we loved the good and quieting dark,

and hated the aching light.

We did what was expected of us.

We loved our children

more than our homeland.

We’ve dug all the wells in the ground

and now we’re digging into space—

wells, wells, without beginning and without end.

We did what was expected of us.

We arranged out lives in flower beds and shade,

and straight pleasant walks

as in the garden of an asylum for the insane.

Our despair is domesticated and grants us tranquility.

Only the hopes remain—

wild and vociferous hopes

break the night and tear the day.

We did what was expected of us.

We were like those who enter a movie theater

passing the flushed or pale exiters

weeping quietly or laughing out loud.

And they enter without a second glance, without

turning, into the light and the darkness and the light.

We did what was expected of us.

From far away everything looks like a miracle,

but up close even a miracle doesn’t look like one.

Even a crosser of the divided Red Sea

saw only the sweating back

of the walker in front of him

and the movement of his large thighs.

And all the rest, with a quick side glance—

multicolored fish within the walls of water,

as if observing a sea from behind glass walls.

The real miracles occur at the next table

in a restaurant in Albuquerque.

Two women sat there, one with a slant

zipper, so beautiful

the other said, “I had to control myself

and I didn’t cry.”

And later in the red halls

of a strange hotel I saw

boys and girls holding in their arms

tiny children they had borne

who themselves were holding

tiny, sweet dolls.

They’re digging a hole in the street in front of the big window.

The privates of the earth are exposed in public

like a dirty drunk whose clothes are torn.

And a surveyor balances his transit

on its thin legs and measures straight lines

through it all, as through an empty wasteland.

And a young woman at a nearby table

said to her girlfriend: “I got a small part

in a new play: to enter a room,

pass through, and walk out the other door.”

So she spoke and arose to go.

Stay, stay here beside me,

stay until at least one prophecy is fulfilled.

But she left and I remain. Half the cake

on my plate and half inside me.

The spoon fell on the floor.

Sometimes a man bends over to pick up something

that fell from his hand, and when he straightens up,

the world has changed and become something else.

Four waitresses talk among themselves

in the language of the isle of Malta. In their mouths

enemies in their lives are resurrected, crusaders and muslims—

their sweet talk mixes them together like history,

the words make peace.

The one with hair tight to her head

like a helmet, mixes drinks

with a ringing of spoon and glass. She knows

the soul is made of glass.

On the shelf are wine goblets

turned upside down, silent, silent.

And lies gleam out for a quick coupling.

Four waitresses (one of them eagle—pretty)

serve here under the aegis of strong thugs.

They are the soul, the thugs are the body.

And one of them is eagle-pretty. On her narrow waist

is a wide belt with a silver buckle.

The buckle is the answer.

No, because the buckle is the secret.

The belt is the answer.

In a closed valley far from here

the evening wind blows

from one place to another.

The laundry basement in a big house. There I love

to be, there the sky is temporal, and outside

in front of the high windows, the world is at its noisy evil.

The laundry basement. The meeting place of the angry grey-haired man

with the girl naked under the last sheet left her.

The rest of her clothes, outerwear with underwear,

eden and hell, spin together in enthusiastic dizziness

in the drums of the machines, like the games of chance,

for a new distribution of fates and bodies.

The laundry basement. Among the steam of sweet soaps

there rises within me a great desire

to change my life from beginning to end.

I embrace the warm scented basket

and rise in the drunken elevator

like a man who dreams a dream within a dream

and he must wake up

again and again

to return to this world.

Death in war begins

with the descending of stairs

by one young man.

Death in war begins

with the silent closing of a door,

death in war begins

with the opening of a window to see.

Therefore do not weep for he who departs,

weep for he who descends the steps of his home,

weep for he who put his keys

into his last pocket.

Weep for the photograph who remembers instead of us.

Weep for the remembering paper,

weep for the unremembering tears.

And this spring

who will arise and say to the dust:

From man thou art and to man thou shalt return.

The Hanukkah candles in a box,

the folded clothes in the closet

the children in their beds, the rooms in the house.

Rooms sometimes give birth to smaller rooms

dark-velvet padded boxes

for precious tools and silver trophies of the soul.

And there are people who are soft and open

and there are people in whom all is closed and pressed

like fossilized fish

or fossilized birds.

I am good hearted, not out of good heartedness

but from the decay of my long life.

And outside the window the night wind blows

and a large network is unfolded there:

“Relations among men.”

Requests stuck in the cracks of the wailing wall

scraps of wrinkled and adhered paper.

On the other hand a note stuck into an old iron door

half hidden by a jasmine tree.

“I couldn’t come,

I hope you’ll understand.”

She went out of the one and only door

through which all the dead leave the world.

It is the same one and only door

through which one enters the world.

And her new last name

is the same as everyone’s:

Blessedbehermemory.

Her entire name from now until the resurrection:

Frieda Blessedbehermemory.

A dangerous land. A land full of suspicious objects

and trapped people. And it’s all supposed to be

the beginning of a new religion: each birth, each death,

every thorn fire in the field, each smoke.

Even the lovers have to be careful of what they do and say—

hands outstretched for an embrace, whisper at midnight,

hidden weeping, gazing into the distance, the descent

of stairs in a white dress—all are the beginning of a new religion.

Even the migrating birds know this,

when they come in the spring and don’t stay in the fall,

like the gods of the land who don’t stay either:

and he who says “here was” is a prophet of mercy,

and he who says “here will be” is a prophet of wrath.

And from north to south is an unending summer celebration

and warnings of deep or stormy water

with warnings of water drying up off the face of the earth.

And monuments of memory resting over all, like weights

so that the history of the land will not fly in the wind, like papers.

IN A RESTAURANT

I eat dinner by myself in a restaurant.

The plate elongates from so many longings.

I stretch out a shaven cheek to the alien city.

My reflection trembles in the glass, like the head

on the paper money tossed on the table,

thethin stem of the glass is the soul.

A sign hangs by a string on the door: “Open.”

Sitting inside I see only

the other side, “Closed.”

IN A RUSTIC INN IN GERMANY

Rain falls. The rain always falls

from the past to the future, like words.

The Holy Trinity sits opposite me in the inn:

Jesus, Peace, died in Jerusalem—

like me, probably.

Wet coats hang on hangers,

I speak to them as if they were human.

On the heavy wooden table the wine in the glass

remembers its whole life, like a man

the moment before his death, from grapes to now.

Rain falls outside and within vapors and men mingle,

for all mankind are vapors.

Promises of a better world

that were promised to people a generation or two ago,

brought me to a place I never thought I’d be.

No one marches into the rising sun, no one sets in a fiery red,

but everyone moves a bit forward to places

where happiness rises or sets.

And like tourists we compare without blinking

the rustling map and the visible landscape.

Next to the lake on a white painted bench

sit two people who perhaps were lovers

or perhaps will be. Their voices reached me

but I didn’t understand the words.

Words only hint at the direction

of the speaker’s life and from where he came,

like smoke after a disappearing airplane

which remains a little after the noise

has sunk in the silence of skies.

And a man next to me said:

“Come, we’ll drink honey wine. You’d be surprised

what you can make wine from.” Even

from the dimness in this closed house,

even from tears, even from words.

On the wide sidewalk opposite the university gate

an old woman in a wheelchair sits.

The doctor has ordered her to be seated here

so the flow of young men and women will rinse

her every day, like healing spring waters.

She is freed, freed. Freed from the body

and freed from the soul and from the blood that is the soul,

freed from desires and freed from sudden fears

and from fear for me, freed from honor and freed from shame

freed from hope and despair and from fire and from water

freed from the color of her eyes and the color of her hair,

freed from furniture and freed from spoon knife and fork,

freed from the Jerusalem on High and from the lower Jerusalem

freed from identity and identity card,

freed from the round seals

and from the square seals

freed from copies and freed from staples.

She is freed, freed.

And all the letters and all the numbers

which ordered her life are also free

for new combinations, new fates and new games

of all the generations to come after her.

The body is the reason for love

then it is the fort that guards it

then it is the prison of love.

But when the body dies, love breaks out free

and with great abundance,

like a slot machine that breaks down

and suddenly with a thundering ringing spills out all the coins

of all the generations of fortune.

My mother died on Shevuot at the end of the harvest.

Her elder brother died in 1916 in the war,

I almost died in 1948

and my mother died in 1983.

All of mankind die at the end of the counting,

brief or long.

All of mankind fall in the war.

They all deserve a wreathe and an official letter and a ceremony.

When I stand next to my mother’s grave

I seem to salute

and the hard words of the Kaddish are like a volley of shots

into the clear summer sky.

We buried her in Sanhedria next to my father’s grave.

We saved her a place

as in a bus or a movie theater:

we put flowers and stones there so that her place wouldn’t be taken.

20 years ago the cemetery was on the city’s border

facing the enemy’s position.

The headstones were a good defence against the tanks.

But in my youth there was a beautiful botanical garden here—

lots of plants with small wooden signs

with the names of the plants in Hebrew and Latin:

the common rose, the Middle Eastern sage

and the common shout, the ornamental cry

the annual weeping and the perennial mourning

the red remembering and the aromatic remembering.

The remembering and the forgetting.

Now I am still inside, in the room,

that in a few days I will see only from outside

The closed blinds of your room, where we loved each other,

and not all of humanity.

And we will turn to new lives

in the special way of fastidious

preparations

for death, turning to the wall as in the bible.

The God who is above the breathed air

who made us two eyes and two feet

gave us also two souls.

And we will open these days

on some distant day, as one opens

the Will of the Dead,

years after his death.

What did I learn in the wars:

To march in time to the swinging of arms and legs

like a pump pumping an empty well;

To march in procession and to be alone in the fray,

To bury myself in pillows and covers and the body of my beloved,

and to shout “Mother”, without her hearing,

and to shout “God”, without believing in Him—

and even if I did believe in Him

I would never tell Him about war

the way we keep from children their parents’ atrocities.

What else did I learn? I learned to keep open an escape route:

Abroad, I take a room in a hotel

near the airport or train station,

and even in halls of rejoicing

always look for the little door

with EXIT written over it in red letters.

Battle too begins

like rhythmic dance drums, and its end

is “withdrawal with the dawn.” Forbidden love

and battle both, at times, conclude this way.

But above all I learned the knowledge of camouflage,

so that I would not stand out, not be recognized,

so I would not be distinguishable from my surroundings

even from my beloved,

so I would seem a bush, or a sheep,

a tree, a shadow of a tree,

a doubt, a shadow of a doubt,

an electrified fence, a dead stone

a house, a cornerstone.

If I were a prophet I would dim the brilliance of vision

and black out my faith with black paper

and cover with netting my thoughts of divine chariots.

And when the time comes I’ll put on the camouflage of my end:

the white of clouds and an expanse of sky blue

and endless stars.

Here on Ashkelon beach we have come to the end of memory

like rivers that come to the sea.

The recent past sets into the far past

and the past rises from its depths to the near.

Peace, peace to near and far.

Here among the ruins of statues and columns

I ask, how did Samson raze the temple

where he stood blind and said,

“Let my soul perish with the Philistines!”

Did he embrace the columns as in final love

or thrust them away from him

to be alone in his death?

I

On the street, one summer evening,

I saw a woman writing words

on paper spread out on a locked wooden door.

And she folded it and put it between the door and the mezuzah and went away.

And I didn’t see her face nor the face of the person

who would read the note,

and I didn’t see the words.

A stone rests on my desk with the word “Amen” written on it.

It is a piece of a tomb, a vestige from a Jewish cemetery

destroyed a thousand years ago, in the city where I was born.

One word, “Amen,” is cut deep into the stone—

A hard and final Amen for all that is past and will not return,

a soft and melodious amen like a prayer.

Amen and amen, and may it be His will.

Tombstones break, words pass, words are forgotten,

lips that uttered them turn to dust,

languages die like people,

and other languages are resurrected,

gods in the heavens change, gods come and go.

Prayers remain forever.

2

Jewish Theology, Theo, Theo. As a child I knew a boy

Whose name was Theodore, like Herzl, but his mother called him

Theo. Theo from the playground. Come home Theo.

Don’t stay there with those bad children,

Theo Theo, low, gee.

I want a God who is visible and not seeing, so I can guide him

and tell him what he doesn’t see. And I want

a visible and seeing God. I want to see

how he covers his eyes, like a child playing at being blind.

I want a God, like a window, that if I open

I will see the heaven when I stay at home,

I want a God like a door that opens only outward,

But God is like a door revolving on an axis,

In and out, spinning on an axis

With no beginning and no end.

3.

I say with perfect faith

that prayers precede God.

Prayers created God.

God created man,

And man creates prayers

that create God who creates man.

4.

God is the stairs that ascend

to a place that no longer there, or that isn’t there yet.

The stairs are my faith, the stairs are my despair.

Our father Jacob knew this in his dream.

The angels only decorated the rungs of the ladder

like a fir tree decorated at Christmas,

and the song of ascension is a song of praise

to the God of stairs.

5.

When God left the land he forgot the Torah

with the Jews, and ever since they have been looking for him,

and shouting after him, “You forgot something, you forgot!” in a loud voice.

And everyone thinks that this is their prayer, the prayer of the Jews.

And ever since they endeavor to find hints in the Bible

of where He is found, as it is written, “Ask where God is found,

call Him for He is near.” But He is far away.

6.

Bird footprints on the sand on the beach,

like the handwriting of someone who made notes

to remember things, names, numbers and places.

Footprints of birds in the sand at night

remain in the day as well, but I never saw

the bird who left them. As with God.

7.

Our Father our King, What does a father do

whose children are orphans while he still lives? What can a father do

whose children are dead and he remains a mourning father to the end of days?

Weep and not weep, not remember and not forget.

Our Father our King, what can a king do

in the Republic of pain? Give them

bread and circuses, like all kings:

Bread of memory and circuses of forgetting.

bread and longing, longing for God

and for a better world. Our Father my King.

8.

The Christian God is Jewish, something of a whiner

and the God of the Muslims is an Arab Jew from the wilderness, a little hoarse.

Only the God of the Jews isn’t Jewish.

The way Herod the Edomite was imported to be King of the Jews,

That’s how God was imported from the infinite future,

a conceptual God, with no image no portrait no tree no stone.

9.

The Jewish people read the Torah to God

all year long, a chapter a week,

like Sheherezade who told stories to save her life,

and by the time the Celebration of the Torah comes around,

He forgets and we may begin again.

10.

God like a tourist guide

describes our lives and explains to visitors

and tourists and the children of God, “This is the way we live.”

11.

“There is no God like our God, no master like our Master,” we pray.

“There is no God like our God, no master like our Master,” we sing in loud tones.

And He does not respond. And we raise our voices and sing

“Who is like our God, who is like our Master,” and he does not move

and doesn’t turn to us. And we add with the power of pleadings,

“Thou art out God. Thou art our Master.” Maybe you’ll remember

us now? But he remains indifferent, even

turns to us with strange and cold eyes.

And we’ve stopped stinging and shouting and whisper to him

reminding him of something personal, something small,

“you’re the one who brought our fathers near,

to the scented pipe.” Perhaps now you’ll remember?

(the way a man reminds a woman of old love:

don’t you remember how we bought shoes

in the little shop on the corner and outside

it was raining hard and we laughed a lot?)

And it seems that something awakens in Him and maybe He recalls,

But the Jewish people are already over it.

12.

Always there is one who is moving

and the other who doesn’t move is God.

But when my father prayed he stood in place

erect and unmoving, forcing God to move

like the reeds, to pray to my father.

13.

Communal prayer: Is it better to ask, give us peace

with shouts and cries, or to ask peacefully and quietly?

For if we ask quietly, God will think

we do not need peace and quiet.

14.

Morning Psalms. Innocence ascends from people

Like vapors ascending on high from hot food

that become God and sometimes other Gods.

He took the hair from a woman passing by in a bus window,

the forehead from a cousin who died in her youth, the hands

from a teacher in his childhood, the cheeks from a girl, his first love.

He took the mouth from a woman he saw calling from a phone booth,

the thighs from a maiden lying on the sand by the sea,

the sidelong glance from this one, the eyes from another,

and the waist from an ad in the paper. From all these he fashioned

a woman he truly loved. And when he died they all

came to him, with amputated limbs, faceless, with eyes gouged out,

hair torn, arms cut off, with a wound instead of a mouth.

And they demanded what was theirs, and demanded what was theirs,

and cut from his body, and sliced and pulled from his flesh.

and left him only his lost soul.

of the streets and those living in them is growing

and the hope diminishes for those who hope.

Oh, those other days! The autumn flowers

had the smell of yeast cakes and the children

had names from the Bible, the seasons appeared like orchards

and people like the trees of Eden:

trees of knowledge, knowing good and evil.

A new generation uses the hope of the passing one

like tough tools to crack the future,

and one generation’s disappointments are the reinforcement

of new aspirations and new delusions.

And the river is still called river even when it holds no water

And joy is still called joy.

like a man who wants to return to a beloved place, leaves behind

a book, a basket, glasses, a tiny photo, on purpose

so he’ll have an excuse to return, so the dead leave

life and will come back.

Once I stood in the mist of a distant autumn

in an abandoned Jewish cemetery, although not abandoned by its dead.

The gardener was a specialist in flowers and the seasons of the year

and not a specialist in buried Jews.

Yet even he said: They practice every night for the resurrection.

like one from the Judean settlements, hangs on the wall of the summer house

in a far away land over the sea. And outside is a wide plot of grass

surrounded by flowers. And on the grass stands an empty chair.

And I said to myself, sit on it, sit and remember,

sit and judge, or some one else will sit there.

to remember and judge. And whatever happened an hour ago

and whatever happened at the beginning of the century in that settlement,

and there were trees whose leaves rustled in the wind

and there were trees who stood silent. And the wind

is the same wind. And the rustle and silence of the trees

and what happened and what could have happened

is as if they never were, but the wind is the same wind

and the chair is the same chair to remember and judge

and the plowman in the picture continues plowing things

that never were, and to sow things that never will be.

1.

Verses for Memorial Day—A hymn of remembrance

for those who died in war. Even the remembering generation dwindles and dies,

half in ripe old age and half in unripe old age,

and who will remember those who remember?

2.

How does a tombstone begin? A car burns in red flame

in Sha’ar Ha’Gai. A car burnt black. The skeleton oa car.

The frame of another car burnt in an accident somewhere else.

The frame was painted in anti—rust color, red

as that flame. Next to the frame a wreathe of dried flowers.

Dried flowers compose a Wreath of Remembrance,

Dried bones compose a Vision of the revival of dried bones.

And somewhere, far from here, hiding between the bushes,

is a cracked marble slate and on it names. A branch of oleander

hides most of them like a shock of hair on the face of a beloved.

But once a year the branch is moved aside and the names are called,

and in the firmament a flag flying half mast furled gaily

like a flag flying full mast—easy, easy, happy in its colors and in the wind.

And who will remember those who remember?

3.

And how does one stand in a Memorial Ceremony? Erect or bent,

rigid like a tent or limp as in mourning,

head humbled like the guilty or raised in defiance against death,

eyes wild or frozen like the eyes of the dead,

or shut, to view the stars within?

And what is the best time to remember? Noon

when the shadows are hidden beneath our feet, or dusk

when the shadows grow long like longings

with no beginning and no end, like God?

4.

And what shall we sing in the service? Once we sang the song of the valley,

“Who opened fire and who there fell,/ between Beit Alfa and Nahalal.”

Now I know who it was that opened fire

and I know the name of the one who fell.

He was my friend.

5.

And how shall we mourn? In the dirge of David for Jonathan and Saul,

“Lighter than eagles, braver than lions,” shall we lament.

Had they really been lighter than eagles,

they would have flown up, above the war

and not been injured. We would have seen them from below

and said, “Here are the eagles, here is my son, here my man, here my brother.”

And had they really been braver than lions

they would have stayed lions and not died like humans.

We would have fed them from our hands

and stroked their golden manes.

We would have tamed them in our homes, with love:

my son, my man, my brother, my brother, my man, my son.

6.

I went to the funeral of Ehud who was torn apart in a bombing,

far from here, newly dead in a new war.

And they told me to go to the new funeral home:

“It’s over there right next to the big dairy.

If you follow the scent of milk

you can’t go wrong.”

7.

Once I was walking together with my small daughter,

and we met a man who asked how I was and I asked

how he was—as in the Bible. And she asked, how

do you know him? And I said, “He was with me in the war.”

And she answered and asked, “If he was with you

in the war, how is it that he is not dead but still lives?”

8.

No one has heard of the fruit of the jasmine.

No poet has sung a hymn in its praise.

All sang drunken to the jasmine flower,

its strong aroma, the whiteness of its pale leaves,

the power of its flowers and the strength of their lives,

short like the life of a butterfly and the life of the stars.

No one has heard of the jasmine fruit.

And who will remember those who remember?

On my desk is a stone with “Amen” engraved on it, one shard

saved from the thousands of broken gravestones

in Jewish cemeteries. And I know that all these shards

now fill up the great Jewish time bomb

with the rest of the shards and pieces: broken Tablets

and broken altars and broken crosses and rusty crucifixion nails

with broken household vessels and sacred vessels and broken bones,

and shoes and glasses and artificial limbs and false teeth

and empty tin cans of deadly poison. All of these

fill the Jewish time bomb until the end of days

and though I know of all this and of the end of days

this stone on my desk gives me peace.

It is the stone of truth that cannot be disputed,

the stone of the wisdom of all the stones of wisdom,

stone from a broken tomb

and whole beyond all wholeness.

It is a witness stone of all that has transpired in the world

and all that shall transpire in the world, a stone of amen and of love.

Amen, amen, and may it be His will.