Isreal; Our Lady of Sorrows

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
their 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.


Scott Malby

Posted over on Arts.Org