Water Poetry
Travel advisory ll In this country they’ll pull you over on the road at checkpoints. Don’t be surprised. At any ancient city gate they’d stop you, demand your weapons, water bottle, everything you carry. Even your name. You’d have to declare whom you love, whom hate and whom you long to worship at the altar of this reconstructed temple in this heat. My water flask is empty; yours nearly full but though I ask, you do not offer. Or was it you who asked and I, afraid, refused? That country we both long for lies ahead. Anyone may enter. They say water in the river running through it is abundant, pure. And also free. No need for flasks or buckets. Let’s drop our guns, cast off our fear and go together. Take my hand and in the other, hold this stone. No, not to throw. This stone fits perfectly into your palm. Look: it is white. It has your name engraved. |
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Prayer in time of too much rain on the prairie (June 2010) Let some of it fall on the Negev where travellers press noses to bus windows: a slender landscape leached of colour. Let some of it fall on dusty roadside camels, on silhouetted sheep, shepherds in sand- storms that obliterate the world. Let it descend, a deluge, on the shrinking Dead Sea, the River Jordan dwindling down to a narrow prairie creek. Top up the turbulent Sea of Galilee. Let rain fill barrels on flat-roofed houses in the West Bank, let them overflow the way those ancient mikvehs overflowed with rainwater. Remember the years of prairie drought when the slender panting deer burst forth from dry bush into dry clearing: wild-eyed and thirsty. |
–Sarah Klassen
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