Tonight I remember

 

Tonight I remember lonely days on the empty streets of Jerusalem years ago at the height of the suicide bombing.  I remember exactly what I felt as I walked Emek Refaim, and buses passed me with travelers too poor or to brave to avoid the danger of travel.  As they passed, I thought to myself about their eyes, I gazed into their eyes, and I thought I saw ghosts, about to die.  I wondered if the blast would hit me as they drove past and our blood and souls would mix in eternity.  They did not die that night, and neither did I, I think.  Once a ghost always a ghost.  I am the walking dead of this conflict between Arab and Jew.  I carry them all with me in my soul, and I wait to join them one day.

What more can I do but feel their lives and deaths?  As I write this a severe storm has just passed overhead in Arlington, VA, and now there is a deep rainbow staring me in the face, as if to smack me out of death’s door.  All around me it was black and white, and now all is yellow everywhere.  The rainbow is us.  After the black thunder and white lightening threatens our very being, only then do we seem to be struck by the promise of our different colors.  Whoever made that rainbow please bless all our Arabs and Jews.

 

© Marc Gopin

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