Sunday, March 25, 2007

Jerusalem

Else Lasker-Schueler, 1943

God built Palestine from a spine
and from one only bone: Jerusalem.

I promenade as through mausoleums -
Of stones is our Holy City.
So rest the stones on the beds of their dead Sea
In place of watery silks that played herein: They come and die away.

They glaze into the wayfarer with a callous reasoning -
And he drowns in her glazing night.
I am angry, that I cannot be overwhelmed.

If you would come...
Enshrouded in a wintercoat -
And would do away with the dusk hours of my day -
My arm would frame you, a rather auxiliary image of the holy.

Like once when I suffered in the darkness of my heart -
Therein both your eyes: blue clouds.
They delivered me from my turbid mind.

If you would come...-
To the land of the ancestors -
You would exhort me like a little boy:
Jerusalem - come to know Resurrection!

She hails us
The living flag of the "only God",
Greening hands, that sow the odes of life.

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