How deep the valley which enclosed
The lifeboat washed against the shore.
The heart says goodnight at dawn,
And hopes the dark is best
Which fears the day to come.
ON FIRST SEEING JERUSALEM
The way to knowing is to know
How useless to talk of hills and colours
Looking at Jerusalem.
To know is to keep silent
Yet in silence
One no longer knows;
Can never unknow what was known
Or let silence slaughter reason.
One knows, and always knows
Unable to believe silence
A better way of knowing.
One sees Jerusalem, knows
Yet does not, comes to life
And knows that walls outlast whoever watches.
The Temple was destroyed: one knows for sure.
One joins the multitude and grieves.
Knows it from within.
One does not know. Let me see you
Everyday as if for the first time
Then I’ll know more:
Which already has been said
By wanderers who, coming home,
Regret the loss of that first vision.
The dust that knew it once is mute.
Stones that know stay warm and silent.
From pale dry hills I watch Jerusalem,
Make silence with the stones:
An ever-new arrival.
NAILS
Tel Aviv is built on sand:
Sand spills from a broken paving stone
And sandals cannot tread it back;
Waves beat threateningly
A sea to flow through traffic
Climb hills and wash Jerusalem.
Every white-eyed speckle of its salt
Feasts on oranges and people,
Envying their safety;
And their rock through which
Six million nails were hammered
As deep as the world’s middle,
And the sky that no floodtide can reach.
LEARNING HEBREW
With coloured pens and pencils
And a child’s alphabet book
I laboriously draw
Each Hebrew letter
Right to left
And hook to foot,
Lamed narrow at the top,
The steel pen deftly thickening
As it descends
And turns three bends
Into a black cascade of hair,
Halting at the vowel-stone
To one more letter.
Script comes up like music
Blessing life
The first blue of the sea
The season’s ripe fruit
And the act of eating bread:
Each sign hewn out of rock
By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.
I’m slow to learn
Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads
Arks and ships in black, pure black
The black of the enormous sky
From behind a wall of rock:
With their surety of law
Such shapes make me illiterate
And pain the heart
As if a boulder bigger than the earth
Would crush me:
Struck blind I go on drawing
To enlighten darkness.
Such help I need:
Lost in this slow writing,
Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick
Go into the cavern-mouth
And sleep by phosphorescent letters
Dreaming between aleph or tav
Beginning and end
Or the lit-up middle.
Dreams thin away:
In day the hand writes
Hebrew letters cut in my rock
Painted by a child on the page,
For they are me and I am them
But can’t know which.
SYNAGOGUE IN PRAGUE
Killers said
Before they used their slide-rules
‘Death is the way to Freedom’:
Seventy-seven thousand names
Carved on these great walls
Are a gaol Death cannot open.
Eyes close in awe and sorrow
As if that name was my mother
That boy starved to death my son
Those men gassed my brothers
Or striving cousins.
It might have been me and if it was
I spend a day searching the words
For my name.
I’d be glad it was not me
If the dead could see sky again,
Reach that far-off river and swim in it.
What can one say
When shouting rots the brain?
The dead god hanging in churches
Was not allowed to hear
Of work calling for revenge
To ease the pain of having let it happen
And stop it being planned again.
Letters calling for revenge on such a wall
Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,
And seventy-seven thousand
Stonily indented names
Would still show through.
Vengeance is Jehovah’s own;
To prove He’s not abandoned us
He gave the gift of memory,
The fruit of all trees
In the Land of Israel.
ISRAEL
Israel is light and mountains
Bedrock and river
Sand-dunes and gardens,
Earth so enriched
It can be seen from
The middle of the sun.
Without Israel
Would be
The pain
Of God struck from the universe
And the soul falling
Endlessly through night.
Israel
Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world
A storm-light marking
Job’s Inn — open to all –
An ark without lifeboats
On land’s vast ocean.
ON AN OLD FRIEND REACHING JERUSALEM
No one may ask what I am doing here:
Olive-leaves one side glisten tin
The other is opaque like my dulled hair.
I travelled far. I walked. I ate
The train’s black smoke,
Choked on Europe’s bitter sin.
When forests grew from falling ash
I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet
And sucked them back to life for bread.
Christian roofs were painted red
And four horizons closed their doors.
Pulled apart by Europe’s sky
My soul is polished by Jerusalem
Where I fall fearlessly in love
Ashen by the Western Wall,
And through my tears no one dare ask
What I am doing here.