A Prayer of Jerusalem for Yehuda Amichai
Hope is a memory of the future.
—Gabriel Marcel
On full moon midnights I meet the dead
poet at David’s Gate. His satchel
bulges with leather-skinned pomegranates
bleeding juice. The tourists, there
to walk the ramparts, look past him
to the tower. I am not a tourist.
How many? he asks. Hundreds, I say.
He’s not asking shekels or children
or poems. He’s plumbing the wells
of my devotion to the would-
be peace of this place—how often I’ve
gulped ashes. On the Eve
of Fragile Huts, we wander Old City alleys,
citron wafting from our palms.
We remember tomorrow, without thirty-
centimeter bombs or a human chain
stretched from holy to profane. After Elijah
sets his scalpel to the heart
of the city, hawks and doves feed
from the same watering hole,
the streets brim bread and Jerusalem
roses. It is the full moon of Nisan.
The poet wonders, Ma nishtana—what
has changed this night? We watch
the moon, gape at the swarming streets.
Everything changes.
Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have been published in various literary journals, including Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Chautauqua, and Nimrod, and have received a Best of the Net nomination and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. An ordained rabbi, she offers spirituality and poetry workshops online and around the country. She lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
