ISRAEL; OUR LADY OF SORROWS

I'm always beginning again, walking her radiant
streets of ripe trees where the sun dances across
her belly in a land adorned with thorns. Her breath
is fragrant and earthy, smelling of peaches, olives,
apricots pervaded by the musky smell of history
for beneath a come hither smile, her tempestuous
nature broods hot in the eye of afternoons where
old men despair of doves as they fold their newspapers
following the laughter of flirtatious girls who peer into
the front of tiny shops whose windows seem to wink
at passing crowds as if time were a prismatic dance
of reflections genuflecting as I pass by.

Hibernating within the heat the day is washed in blue;
the elegiac revised with invisible radiance that shakes
my perceptions shaping it anew before it departs
leaving behind a bite of awareness whispering
of the significant.

Suddenly, an eruption of fire. A confusion of smoke.
Noise, shouts, people choke, cry, scream, crawl
away from there own severed limbs before collapsing
in pools of blood. I whisper to myself slowly, be deliberate,
see into that you may pass through that red hot place
in your gut of churning panic that makes you run
but knows there's no safe place to hide as each image
becomes a door of accusations and I become the mirror,
the voice, the reflection; where everything I've believed
is forgotten in the horrible instant as it happens, realizing
itself through me in this land where each day is a memorial to fear and hate.

They call you cursed, unfortunate people of Israel.
A weeping willow. Compassion's coffin splintering
the eye of God. I see in you a stormy pestilence
of vindictive voices crying aloud from lost streets
of hope cursed by history, grown old and cynical,
a fallen sanctuary where no stone is clean, no motive
pure, no heart unbroken.

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