24
IN THE THIN LIGHT OF hunted pleasure, I become afraid that I will never know my sorrow. I call on you with a cry that concentrates the heart. When will I cry out in gratitude? When will I sing to your mercy? Tomorrow is yours, the past is in debt, and death runs toward me with the soiled white flag of surrender. O draw me out of an easy skill into the art of the holy. I am afraid of what I have done to my soul, and the judgement is established like a sudden noise. O help me bow down to your anger. I lie beside the corpse of my idol, in the spell of fire and ashes, my word for the day of atonement forgotten. Lift me up with a new heart, with an old memory, for my father’s sake, for the sake of your name which rings in heaven and hell, through worlds destroyed and worlds to come, tangible music shining between the hidden and the perceived, garbled in my ear and clearly the place I stand on, O precious name of truth uncontradicting. The scornful man will bend his knee, and holy souls will be drawn down into his house. Hedges will be planted in the rotting world, the young shoots protected. Time will be measured from mother to child, from father to son, and learning will speak to learning. Even the evil are weary, the bomb falls on the pilot’s son, the riot shouts out to be calmed. The wound widens every heart, the general exile thickens, the whole world becomes the memory of your absence. How long will you hunt us with sorrow? How long will they rage, the fires of refinement? Blood drinking blood, wound swallowing wound, sorrow torturing sorrow, cruelty rehearsing itself under the measureless night of your patience. When will the work of truth begin, to verify your promise? Now that all men hear each other, let your name be established in hell, and count us back to the safety of your law, father of mercy, bride of the captured earth. Speak to your child of his healing, in this place where we are for a moment.
25
MY SON AND I LIVED IN A cave for many years, hiding from the Romans, the Christians, and the apostate Jews. Night and day we studied the letters of one word. When one of us grew tired, the other would urge him on. One morning he said, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and I said ‘I agree.’ He married a beautiful girl, the daughter of one of our benefactors, grown from the child who brought us food in the night to the one for whom he waited all day, and they were blessed with children. My wife came back to me one strange afternoon, all changed, all lightened, and we opened a bookstall in Jerusalem, where we sold small bilingual editions of the Book of Psalms. My daughter appeared one day and said, ‘I believe you have neglected me.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, and her face shone with forgiveness. She married a goldsmith, a maker of ceremonial objects, bore children, and deepened the happiness of her parents. Every so often we gather at midnight before the Wall, our family of little families. ‘After all,’ we say, ‘the Romans do not eat flesh torn from a living animal, and the Christians are a branch of the tree, and the apostate Jews are still embraced by the Word.’ We talk in this manner, we sing the time-honoured songs, and we compose new ones, as we were commanded:
Jerusalem of blood
Jerusalem of amnesia
Jerusalem of idolatry
Jerusalem of Washington
Jerusalem of Moscow
Let the nations rejoice
Jerusalem has been destroyed
26
SIT IN A CHAIR AND KEEP still. Let the dancer’s shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer’s chest from your chest, the dancer’s loins from your loins, the dancer’s hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves, and let him serve God in beauty. When he fails, send him again from your chair. By such an exercise, even a bitter man can praise Creation, even a heavy man can swoon, and a man of high responsibility soften his heart.
II
27
ISRAEL, AND YOU WHO call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy. Who will say it? Will America say, We have stolen it, or France step down? Will Russia confess, or Poland say, We have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering in the immunity of superstition. Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness, and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy made you wise? Will Ishmael declare, We are in debt forever? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless. To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines
