What the Light Reveals
 

What the Light Reveals

  Har Hazaytim, Jerusalem

Marble boxes cover this hill, graves
crumbled and aged, the color of teeth,
row after row facing east; buried

here are you who will rise
first, call back to the others, enter
the world of endless life. Your names

echo through generations,
like the lamplighter who walks,  
torch in hand, moves

slowly from one grave to the next,
sending a glow into the darkening
night. Or perhaps just a match

set to a wick of pure olive oil,
the light clean and clear
as a summer day, sunlight

so bright we hide our eyes,
and fruit that ripens only
in the long heat of the summer sun,

fruit whose names define us:
Tamar, Te'ena, Rimon, Zayit,
whose shade shields us, whose
 
pips and stems compost back into the soil
on this eastern side of the hill,
where lights come on slowly with the dusk—
 
East Jerusalem with its cacophony of cars
and marquees, the green lights
of minarets kindled

one after the other, dotting the way
far into the folds of the desert.
Muezzins who call out,

one leading to the next—
voices, mournful, undulating—pleas
so like the shofar cries
 
that drift up these stone stairs, call us
back to where we come from— this umbilicus
that whispers a soul to a soul. Your names:

Keila, Pessel, Shaindela, Ruchel: you,
who loved to knead the dough: you,
who danced the hem

of her wedding dress to pieces: you,
who died in the Grodno Ghetto,
giving birth on a dirty floor,

and though we never knew your stories
our souls still told the truth, the death
was not easy. This is why we can’t sleep.

And the wind that once
blew cold in Belarus, now hot
and dry over this eastern hill.

No more lamplighters:
we are Nava, Odelyia, Yael,
and electricity now scrambles
 
the light between the words,
whispers rise like mist, a simple
wish that wherever we are

we can hearken back to the sweet pink
of a western sky, the last kiss of daylight
as traffic fades, the stars unveil

themselves, the muezzins now quiet. Wherever
you are, tell us why we need any answers,
tell us what any light will reveal.

​

​

​