Constructing Kasun, Educator

Today we went to Tel Aviv (we’ve been staying in a suburb of the city and have been into town for dinner and swimming).  Modern.  Clean.  Great architecture.  The young and fashionable populate the streets alongside those who care less about fashion in their strappy Velcro sandals and worn T-shirts.  The Mediterranean beaches offer sand as soft as flour and clear blue waters.  We also went to Jaffa, a port city now connected to Tel Aviv, full of 4,000 years of history.  We finished the day by listening to traditional music in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino.  I was mesmerized and didn’t want the violinist to stop playing.  Two hours later, I could still be listening to her.

But tonight I feel like relaying the experience more in poetry.  I’m leaning more toward an impressionistic sense of life here, and prose won’t help me convey that. 

Peace at the Last

Distant cousin, I thought you were younger,

Though I had never seen your face in person, only glanced

At hard images from newspapers suggesting

The precocious, even insolent, adolescent

Smoking unfiltered cigarettes at midnight, inviting trouble

From the rowdy neighbors you might provoke

If you got the idea that you’d enjoy a fight.

Instead,

I find a saddened sage,

Deep creases around eyes that penetrate

And yet don’t assume they know the only answer

But rather seek distinct voices,

With a high tolerance for dissonance and discord.

On the other hand,

I sometimes find you fixated

On one story, like a catchy tune you can’t rid from your mind.

So, like you, I dichotomize yet at the same time conjure

Chaos as unity, where multiple voices are synthesized,

In search of a higher solution.

You are sands and mountains and skyscrapers,

History and modernity,

A miracle of a nation and at the same time

A bloody scar that won’t heal over,

Picked and scraped by your nearby brothers

Who you don’t seem to recognize as such,

Who don’t treat you as blood, who scratch

To draw more blood to the surface, and

Neither you nor your brothers are willing

To let scars heal or allow blood to comingle

In a way that might allow for peace.

And I watch you, seducing land,

Place for which I would fight and die

If I considered it my birthright to live on this land,

And I marvel at what you have achieved

In a finger snap of history and weep at what you

Have failed to accomplish, what my own land

Has lost and denied through history.

I want to lose myself in your religion, your chants

And prayers and Sabbath and people, want the sands

To caress and then swallow me, waters to cleanse

And purify me, want the streets to unfold in below

Feet that can tread for miles and miles on mosaics

From thousands of years ago, streets paved by your

National project, which I want to believe can coexist

With a strange and hostile and beautiful world.

And I can only offer a prayer as conciliation:

Peace and peace and peace,

At the last.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Israel, education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.