CITY

I have fallen in love with a city

Where marble and stone worn thin by time

Chant beyond the temples and tombs

Where my ancestors lie

In deep chalk valleys.

            I have fallen in love with a city

            Where sandaled feet shuffled

            Upon the descending hills of Judea;

            Where Abraham’s ram bleated before the sacrifice

            And David wrote psalms to a forgiving God.

I have fallen in love with a city

Built of imagined stone where

My desire reaches out to possess

The walls, the ancient cobbled streets,

Old digs and graves and sage-resounded caves.

            I have fallen in love with a city

            And wish to grow like the olive tree,

            With its gnarled branch searching for life,

            With its root twisted into rock,

            Just as my tortured soul roots in its earth.

I have fallen in love with a city

Fed by hate-nurtured springs soaking

Courts of sandal-smoothed stones

Where once played shaking timbrels; waking horns;

Now play timbrels of bullets; horns of havoc.