Beach
I used to walk, back in my long walking days, down a wonderful
promenade, just across from my usual hotel on the beach, all the
way down to Jaffa sometimes, always bathed in the very fine
Mediterranean air, blowing gently in and breathing along with
me from the sea.
Nearby, I would pass a small bar that had been blown up not that long
before, this taking me through all sorts of memories like of a night, walking
by the Dolphinarium disco by the shore, and, while navigating through
the large crowd there waiting to get in, thinking, sort of offhand, about what
a target it could be for the terrorists.
Just a few months later, happy at home, working hard and taking my safe
and healthy kids around to their various events, I was gasping a bit when
I saw, on CNN, that very same spot on that far away beach, blown completely
to hell with 21 dead, 16 of them teenagers, and thinking of what a way that
was to live, day to day, with that sort of possibility.
My mind’s eye wandered back to my drives around that town in the 90’s,
talking about bus bombings one day and being told, by my driver, that
his daughter’s best friend had been killed on the corner just ahead of us
the previous year for the crime of being a kid on a Tel Aviv street, waiting for a bus.
Always, thinking back on my years traveling in and out of there, that history
is in the grip of the momentum of an inescapable line of facts, always back
and then forward from the year of my birth, 1948, when the Egyptians,
Jordanians, Syrians and Iraqis had come in to kill, if they could,
every Zionist they could find.
The mind again reeling, to a night out in the desert seeing the lights of an
early rave there in the early 2000’s or so and much later, as the non-Jew that
I am, asking my Jewish daughters if they would have been at another rave,
in the fall of 2023, way down by the Gaza, if they had happened to be in the
country then, and being told, “Yes, yes of course we would have been there”,
that being just their sort of thing.
But still, this old friend of this State is confused by many things over on the
West Bank and why they stir the pot there, and by how they can justify using
a 2000-pound bomb in a jammed-packed Gaza. And, seeing these things, I
can’t escape any of the tears and the paradoxical nature of this enterprise
sometimes, because unable to justify some of this, even
considering how well I know and love the place; it still causes me this pain.
Forever by the waterfront here, across the breakwaters and cities and
out in the desert and up in the hills we find, 75 years on, the same old
tropes and forces, from the year of my birth as in ages before, pushing,
always pushing, to sweep this land “from the river to the sea.”
The old-time socialists of the Haganah had the idea, first seeing this back
in the 20’s, to arm themselves to defend home and children, not a religious
person in their midst and, despite the excesses of the Irgun like the bombing
of the King David, kept their heads and stuck to fact.
Today, that founding vision, obscured by the fanatics on the West Bank of
today, out on the roads and in the fields (many of them Americans) terrorizing
people in their own way, putting the whole idea of a nation of refuge and
peace in peril with their hate and their indiscriminate shooting and allowing
the real bigots and Nazis around the world to deal in false equivalence.
It’s all dark there on the West Bank and the sky is like ink, Likud fully complicit.
Confusing, primitive in their mad religion, their zealotry, they disturb old sacred
grounds that rise there along with the thousands of years of armies, disruptions, murder.
They are not of the modern world.
Climb back to the top with me, up the Mount of Olives, and look across at the
ancient Crusader walls and the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock
and the vast parade of parables, history, fantasy, and the old blood in the wind
and the undeniable fact of the brilliance of the light as it strikes that dome that
stands on the bones of David and is down to today the most visible of wounds
and the clear sight and the obvious rights of the sons and daughters of the most
ancient tribes to come to their home there.
Ruben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulin,
Joseph, Benjamin, all those desert tribes spread the length and breadth of the
earth, migrating off the wasteland to that home and
this place by the hand of Moses.Not to be resolved by anyone alive in this time.
John Huey is the author of ‘The Moscow Poetry File’, published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press in 2017. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including ‘The Great World of Days’, published by Day Eight in 2021. He has also been widely published in many on-line and print journals since he resumed writing poetry in 2011 after a long hiatus. He lives with his wife in Bethesda, MD. www.john-huey.com
Image: Jewish Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
