חביבה פדיה

Jerusalem below displaced herself

From the pavements to the soles of my shoes

Jerusalem above displaced herself

To my hat from the vaulted blues

I walk on and the chambers of my heart are void

There is a beat which always pains me as I sit or come and go

I try to discover if it comes from the pain of the empty space inside the chambers

Before the rupture or after

There is a dull aching inside me I cannot decide whether it is the pain desperate to be filled

Or the pain from clearing away the debris

There is a dull aching in the morning papers and the scholarly books

Concerning Jerusalem there is a dull aching as to whether Jerusalem is a temple city or country

Or whether she is all things

With the pitch black becoming sky-blue and the spark of light turning into a clear thin opalescence

Dripping like spring water the twittering of the turtledoves and the pecking of the woodpeckers

Being reborn every morning here on the trees and in their mouths the Song of Songs

Open to me my dove my undefiled my head is full of dew and my locks with the drops of the morning

I wear a hat to go into the street and when walking to the valley I wear shoes

I walk freely in the pavementless city far from the Jerusalem of twos

Rubbish bins cats eucalyptuses and crows smiling inside sheets of air

Compressed and saturated with the smell of salts sauntering over green plastic grass strewn with rubbish

The air is thick

My whole country is Jerusalem. I observe her from my dwelling place at the edge of the valley

She is painful inside me like the beat the heart always misses when it is struck and falls in love

I see Jerusalem transparent before me. I am wrapped in her.

The desolate valley is full of her. You have to go far away to view the place from where it is possible

To apprise the Foundation Stone shedding tears I drink them within me. In the dust

Towards the end of 45 a cabbalist was turning over rolling about in the earth dressed in sackcloth Drinking his salty tears from small glasses of Arak lamenting the cries of

Rachel for her sons who have turned to ash until he fainted so who am I that I should cry

Sitting here on steps of dust why the mourning why the woe

Sitting between the ruins amongst the piles of junk the divisions of my thoughts and the land of my debris

And the two Jerusalems as two goal-keepers within me kicking their balls from above

And from below towards the pervading middle. I am all basin and the blood boils I am all for you Jerusalem

Translated: Tzvi Howard Cohen