I wake into yet another day of doubt
creeping in as ants through a warped doorjamb.
The morning news brings new atrocities
as I pour milk neither sweet nor sour into the memorial
glass. At breakfast, I read the morning paper.
The Jordan becomes a cesspool, which may run dry given
another year. Half a century of buried landmines
seed her weedy banks, rank pottage strewn
by us, by them, exploding at the lightest step.
Yesterday's fragments shattered the leg of some poor
boy. The radio drones a politician's promises
of peace. While I make my roux, waves bite stagnant air,
on Av's first Friday. It will take chemistry, not miracles,
to proof this challah. I don't believe in miracles, though
in my pre-dawn dream, Elisha visits, bald prophet
who filled empty sinkholes with water and quenched our thirst,
Elisha who sweetened Ein Es-Sultan's poisoned spring.
Now Naaman the Syrian general comes bent, moaning,
greaves cast off, javelin fallen, his skin leprous scabs.
Elisha disobeyed a mighty king: Let him come to me,
and he will learn there is a prophet in Israel. Elisha ordered
Naaman immerse seven times in the Jordan, his savaged
lesions healed, the warrior's body salvaged.
Then in my dream, I see his face; the shattered boy
of yesterday's news. The prophet holds a stick in his left hand,
a prosthetic olive branch. He touches the leg, birthing new bones.
The calf becoming muscular, the thigh again a pillar.
Then in an ordained gesture, Elisha throws the branch deep
into bucking whirlpools, as from the Jordan's silted throne
a mason's ax emerges, bucking on the eddies. On the shore
Solomon's temple rises, beside it a domed mosque rises
from a severed branch-from these ceded waters.
