Upon the threshold of the one I love, we came,
Only to be turned back by the stranger’s law, the sentry’s wall.
And so I told my soul, perhaps this is a mercy after all;
For what would you see in Jerusalem, should you enter now?
You would see all that your heart cannot endure,
As its houses rise to meet you from the path’s slow bend.
For not every soul, in finding its beloved, finds a friend,
And not all absence is a wound that brings us low.
If the joy of meeting came before the sorrow of the farewell,
That fragile joy could never be a fortress for the soul.
For once you have seen the ancient city, whole,
That vision will follow you wherever you may go.
In Jerusalem, a Georgian grocer, weary of his wife,
Mulls over a vacation, or a new coat of paint for the hall.
In Jerusalem, a scholar down from Manhattan
Deciphers the Law for Polish boys.
In Jerusalem, an Ethiopian cop shuts down a market street.
A machine gun rests on a settler not yet twenty,
A skullcap greets the Wailing Wall.
And blonde tourists from the West who see nothing of Jerusalem at all,
You see them, capturing photos of each other,
With a woman who has sold radishes in the square all her living day.
In Jerusalem, soldiers, booted, tread upon the clouds.
In Jerusalem, we prayed upon the asphalt of the ground.
In Jerusalem, who is in Jerusalem, but you?
And History turned to me, a knowing smile:
“Did you truly think your eyes would miss them, and see another kind?
Behold them now before you. They are the living script; you, a footnote, left behind.
Did you think a single visit, my son, could peel away
The city’s thick veil of what is,
So you might see in her what your heart has always held?
In Jerusalem, every man is someone else.”
She is a gazelle in the long desert of time, a fate decreed.
You are still running in her wake since she last looked at you and fled.
Have mercy on your soul an hour; I see the strength has left you.
In Jerusalem, who is in Jerusalem, but you?
O Scribe of History, wait. The city’s age is not one, but two.
One is a foreign age, assured, that sleepwalks through the day.
And another, hidden, cloaked and silent, that slips unseen along the way.
Jerusalem knows herself. Ask her people, and they will show you.
For in the city, everything
Is given a tongue, and when you ask, it will make its meaning plain.
In Jerusalem, the crescent moon arches like an unborn child,
Leaning protectively over its kin on the domes below,
A father’s love for his sons, nurtured over years of sun and snow.
In Jerusalem, the buildings are themselves quotations,
Carved from the Gospels and the Qur’an.
In Jerusalem, beauty is an octagon of lapis blue,
And above it, may its glory last, a golden dome,
A convex looking-glass, where heaven’s face is captured and distilled.
It cradles the sky, brings it near,
And hands it out like aid in a time of siege, to those who have a claim,
When a nation, after Friday prayer, stretches out its hands.
And in Jerusalem, the sky is scattered amongst the people.
We protect it, and it protects us.
We carry it upon our shoulders, a sacred trust,
If time should wrong its moons.
In Jerusalem, the pillars of dark marble stand,
Their ancient veins like trails of smoke, turned into stone.
And windows, high on mosques and churches,
Take the morning by the hand, to show it how to paint with coloured light.
And the morning says, “No, like this.”
And the window says, “No, like this.”
Until, their long debate concluded, they agree to share.
So the morning is free outside the hallowed walls,
But should it wish to enter,
It must yield to the judgment of the Merciful’s windows.
In Jerusalem, a Mamluk school, for a boy who came from beyond the river,
Sold in a slave market in Isfahan,
To a merchant from Baghdad, who brought him to Aleppo,
Where its prince feared the glint of blue in his left eye,
And gave him to a caravan bound for Egypt.
And there, after some years, he became the scourge of Mongols,
The Sultan’s right hand.
In Jerusalem, a scent that holds both Babylon and India
In a perfumer’s shop in Khan al-Zayt.
By God, it is a scent that speaks a language you will know, if you but listen.
It whispers through the tear gas: “Heed them not.”
And when the cloud has passed, it breathes: “You see?”
In Jerusalem, contradictions rest at ease.
The people do not deny the wonders,
They are like bolts of cloth, the old and new turned over in their hands.
And miracles, there, can be touched by the hand.
In Jerusalem, if you were to shake an old man’s hand,
Or touch a stone façade,
You would find the text of a poem etched upon your palm,
O noble son, or perhaps two.
In Jerusalem, despite the endless tragedies,
A scent of childhood on the air, an innocence that breathes.
So you see a dove declare a kingdom in the sky,
Between the space of one shot and the next.
In Jerusalem, the graves are ordered,
Like lines of scripture in the city’s book, whose pages are the earth.
All have passed this way.
For Jerusalem accepts all who come to her, the faithful and the faithless.
Walk through her and read the headstones.
All the tongues of this world are here.
The Zanj, the Franks, the Kipchaks and the Slavs, the Bosniaks,
The Tatars and the Turks, the people of God and the people of ruin,
The pauper and the lord, the sinner and the saint.
All who have walked this earth are here.
They were the margins of the book,
But they became the city’s text before us.
O Scribe of History, what has changed,
That you have made us the exception?
O Sheikh, rewrite the book, and read it once again;
I fear your reading was flawed.
The eye closes, then it opens.
The driver of the yellow cab turns us north, away from her gate,
And Jerusalem falls behind us.
The eye sees her in the right-hand mirror,
Her colours shifting in the pre-dusk light,
When a smile surprised me; I know not how it crept upon my face.
It spoke to me, as I stared and stared:
“You who weep behind the wall, are you a fool?
Are you mad?
Let your eye not weep, you, the forgotten one from the body of the text.
Let your eye not weep, you Arab, and know,
That in Jerusalem, there are those within the walls, and yet…
I see no one in Jerusalem, but you.”