“Next year in Jerusalem”: three poems

Adam Horovitz

Married to the body (i)

Blood, like music,
             links back into itself,
rich with the thought-threads
             of generations.

In the blood,
haemoglobin sings like fire
                             dancing on the rooftops.

DNA shivers and spirals
                                                  through veins,
mournful as clarinets.

Blood is a hurtling music
                          married to the body.

There is no ghetto in blood.

“My own hope is that, next year, everyone will be able to celebrate freedom in Jerusalem, be they Jew, Christian, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or other. We are all fellow humans. I stand firmly behind the closing line of the poem that opens the sequence: There is no ghetto in blood.” (Adam Horovitz)

My Invisible Aunt  (iii)

An aunt I’ve never seen in the flesh
lurks in my grandmother’s kitchen
perhaps communing with the kosher sausages.
She is avoiding me.

I had always suspected her of not existing
despite glimpsing photographs
of her with my vanished Rabbi uncle,
whose existence I also had to take on trust.

The sight of her half-remembered face
repeated like a smudged photocopy
in inquisitive men who said they were her sons
eventually proved her to be real

But that was long ago and tonight I am
being moved like a chess piece
from room to room in an effort to preserve
the kosher space around my invisible aunt.

My grandmother smiles regretfully,
divides herself between the ghettos
my unseen aunt creates.
“She is very orthodox,” my grandmother explains.

I smile politely and wonder if,
thanks to this careful separation,
my invisible aunt envisages me
as half-Jew meat or watered milk

or just as unclean animal, as pig.
I am tempted to burst through the curtains
and confront her – but she’s far from being a vicar
and the noises off in this sorry farce

are those of bigotry run riot,
of prayer and weakness,
and of the foundations of her god’s house
shifting in the sand she built them on.

Also in openDemocracy, two poems from the “transmedial crusader” Michael Horovitz and a profile by Candida Clark; for Michael and Adam (and Frances) Horovitz, see “Writing in the Family”

(ix) Next Year in Jerusalem

Next year in Jerusalem
          politicians will put down roots
they can't pull up,
                         and wither into roadside shrubs.

Next year in Jerusalem
                            it will be the Egyptians' turn
                                    to run away and hide in the desert
                whilst the Israelis avert their eyes
                                               and count to twenty.

Next year in Jerusalem
                        generals will keep finding
                                   sheep tangled in bushes
              whenever they attempt
                                          to send in the troops.

Next year in Jerusalem
          an old man with a large beard
                      will walk backwards through a hall of mirrors,
                                    chanting,
          dressed only in fig leaves.

Next year in Jerusalem
                there will be no guns,
no bombs, no blood-blind eye-for-an-eyes -

only doves
           pecking hard at olive branches,
                                 and rainbows lurking on street corners
                                                        touting hope.

Adam Horovitz’s three poems on openDemocracy are from his collection Next Year in Jerusalem (HooHah Press, 2004)