April Fool’s Day 2019
A blustery evening on the slippery stones of the plaza
the clouds have raged all day.
The wet air reminds me of London in April after a shower.
The sky closes in on the yellow-bathed Kotel.
I count only 4 or 5 men leaning close to the wall
the soggy stones receiving their tears.
The rest are huddled in the side catacomb warmed by space heaters,
I joined the evening prayers.
I face the huge Herodian wall wondering
how many slaves were used to hold these massive
stones.
A long-bearded man begins the prayer-
I'm glad I will be able to say Kaddish.
I sit on a plastic garden chair facing east and I am lost in time and memory.
The hum of the worshipers surrounds me as I sit in my grief
facing the future without mother.
Grief is such a lonely experience.
Why did I come here?
Because an ancient text told me this is the last place on earth
where a trace of Her resides?
But the Kotel is silent tonight.
The stone-faced wall gives no hint of Her presence
in fact its grand facade makes no impression on my soul.
It is too fraught, it has too much culture,
historical and religious baggage for just a wall.
No icons, no images, no statuettes to focus the mind
It is too harsh, too bleak, too cruel providing no relief for the mind to unload.
Yet there is something very real about tonight.
Facing a silent obelisk in front of me,
a stone the height of two men reaching to the arched
ceiling, this will survive time, surely my life.
And my descendants will come here to pray
and beg for their lives and ask relief of their suffering.
And as mother is no longer in my life, and as I mourn her loss,
this wall stares back at me in silence,
reminding me of how silent the cemetery is.
How eternal the ending is, and will be for me in the not so distant future.
How I need to befriend death and stop escaping its silent message.
The prayers end with my solemn Kaddish
and I am grateful for my strangers-in-prayer who wait
for me to end, each knowing that one day
they will need a quorum themselves to memorialize their loved ones.
I leave the plaza acknowledging
how few worshipers came on this forlorn Jerusalem evening
as a wet cold wind wraps herself around my bare neck.
This place, this plaza, this Kotel is too much too
many tears, too much history, too many claims,
too many political narratives and cultural
appropriations.
No wonder She is silent.
