AND ON JERUSALEM PEACE

AND ON JERUSALEM PEACE

AND ON JERUSALEM PEACE

1.

The taxi-driver on the way from Tel Aviv
talks and laughs for his foreign visitors,
pointing out the factories where concrete is made
for export, the ancient buildings (though he himself
prefers the modern), the houses where the wealthy live
(he seems to know the price of each). He’s proud
of three sons – “what little terrorists” – and a wife
who keeps his house in order, but finds it difficult
to manage on the little that he makes. Once he tried
his luck in Manhattan, but that didn’t work. When asked
about his army days, he’s cautious: “War’s a sad business,
but you have to fight for your country.” By the time
he drops us off, darkness has come down
                                        and on Jerusalem peace
of the kind that comes with night and electricity.
So it’s not until we’re finally in our hotel room
taking a proper look at the business card he handed us
that we read the bottom line: “Licensed for Personal Arms.”

2.

The Cardo Maximus: the street unearthed
when builders started on a new apartment block.
We stand in open ground,
sun and cats watching us, while the guide
is pointing out paving stones that Hadrian used
in 135 to start an imperial avenue in Aelia Capitolina,
the city Rome was building over what it had destroyed.
After the Romans came the Byzantines. And always
the children of Israel have been coming back,
believing there will come a time when glory
shall be on these stones and on Jerusalem
peace. History has spent a long time here, stacking
stone on stone, until a thousand years are but yesterday
come and gone. And history is not about to go away:
even now, down Hadrian’s thoroughfare,
designed for showing off an army, comes a sound
that sends the cats scattering, and then a little warrior
goes speeding past, his tricycle ablaze with happiness
so entire he might just be Isaiah’s child on his way
to bring the wolf and the lamb together so
they will no longer do each other any harm.


3.

“There is no trash in my street
at home,” said the American,
part of a tourist group pushing its way
down the Jewish Quarter Road
near where the remains have been uncovered
of the Broad Wall believed built by Hezekiah,
who had the temple cleansed and sacrifice performed
so the Lord might send again blessing
on his people and on Jerusalem peace. That wall
held back an Assyrian invasion led by Sennacherib
who declared no god would bring him down
and was in the end murdered by his children,
but it failed to keep out Nebuchadnezzar
of Babylon who in 586 laid waste
the city – that was when the psalm was born,
the psalm of exile, the one about the Israelites being asked
to sing to their captors, the one that goes “if I forget
you Jerusalem, let my right hand wither”, the one
America came to know as “By the Rivers of Babylon”
when it was a pop song and, for a while, a hit in discotheques.


4.

This morning, coming down the Mount of Olives,
I saw a cemetery. Each grave was like a slice of bread
laid down in offering and each seemed to match a stone
from the city walls, as if death and history were still
arguing which of them deserved the sacrifice, which of them
could guarantee there would ever be, on Jerusalem, peace.
“My parents are buried there,” you say, “One was Palestinian.”
Clearly it’s a story you’re not about to share. Downstairs
poets spend the farewell party talking poetry. In Hebrew,
they say, one word holds layers reaching back to Genesis,
so that ruah, the word for breath, also sets the spirit free,
the one who first persuaded nothingness to laugh and come
into the light. We agree next time I come we’ll meet
in Tel Aviv and drink tea facing the sea. Maybe then.


5.

“Walk with me,” said the old Arab
when we got ourselves lost
and asked if he knew
the way to the El-Aqsa Mosque.
There wasn’t time to wonder if
we were about to be sold
into slavery, we were busy keeping up
as he moved through the maze of sloping stone,
taking us so close he could say,
“I have to leave you here,
just go down and turn.” And so it was:
we reached the mosque and found
soldiers guarding doors
that were closed to visitors.

The very next day we took an early flight
to Paris, where we learned
fifteen Arab women had just been killed in Gaza.
                                        On Jerusalem peace;
on the angel of difference a blessing.


6.

I shouldn’t have come here expecting god
and miracles. They say there were miracles here
once. They show you stones: the one that bears
the print of Christ’s ascending foot (it’s here
the Arab boy tries to make me buy his piece
of olive branch and curses when I say I don’t
have the proper coin); the one where Jesus prayed in agony
accepting but also asking if the cup might pass him by
(when I was young a picture of this graced the kitchen wall;
the cloak lifting from the saviour’s back made me think
darkness and devils had got a hold on him and were
never going to let him go). But every stone they show
is walled about, and even the olive trees of Gethsemane,
where I thought I might for a moment lean against hope,
are fenced and safe from me: all I can do
is shove a finger through the wire, but there’s no
power glancing back along my fingertips. How can spirit live
within so many walls, how reach out to anyone
passing by, how shower on them even a small kindness,
and on Jerusalem peace?
                                                    As for God: long gone,
sick of being forever groped by ideas so quarrelsome
and greedy for their truth that they would sacrifice their own
then say it’s what he wanted. Miserere mei, Domine, clean
my heart, give me back not your dogmas but your great poems:
Job who dared you to turn aside long enough for him to spit;
Mary who said you had a way of looking through her nothingness;
Solomon, who roamed language and the night in search of beauty,
had the sense to liken his love to a turtle-dove and not a pigeon,
so should perhaps have thought again before writing that
her neck was like the tower of David, “built as a fortress.”
Poems need the shared warmth of conversation round a table spread
with potatoes, eggplant, fish, and minted tea. They also need
to ignore boundaries and simply pass through all the doors that seem
closed to them.
                                                       Today, having lunch
next door to where they say John the Baptist was born, I looked up
from pumpkin soup and saw that the people across the way
had hung a rug out to air, had hung it over the ancient stone wall
that held their property in. Maybe, I thought, this is all the sign
you’ll get; maybe this
is the bent welcome of a clean and contrite heart.