My Jerusalem

City of Music, City of Poetry. Lucky me, I can hear the rhythms and rhyme schemes of the streets: the hip-hop, hip-hop of little girls jumping rope- Anna Banana reinvented in Hebrew- the vibrations of clotheslines, plucked by windfingers like guitar strings- heartstrings- the huff and puff of buses as they twist and turn and squeeze through all-too-narrow-city-streets, the Halleluyah chorus that erupts every time a kid gets up and gives his seat to someone with a beard, white hair or injury.

The marketplace cacophony: fish breathing their last breaths before their heads are chopped off on the block, waiting to be served up for Shabbat, the twisting tango of shopkeepers and shoppers haggling over specks of dirt, the soprano beep-beep-beep of metal detectors protecting the unsuspecting, but always suspecting, people.

The foreign tunes of foreign tongues: Hebrew’s suntanned brazenness, Russian’s babushkaed proletariat ethic, French’s bereted elegance, Amharic’s dreadlocked click-clack-clack, Yiddish’s yellow-starred oifn pripitchiks, English’s bare-headed chit-chat-chat, Arabic’s kafiyahed snarl.

The dark drumbeat of impending doom cracks through nerves like fireworks. Explosions thunder in the sky, rainstorming fragments of life over heads of little children, getting caught and tangled in their hair.

The bravado of teenagers ringing through the air: "Let's go to Ben-Yehuda tonight- it will be the bomb!"
The cadences: volunteers picking up the mess, the human flesh strewn across the streets.

The choking sobs, the choking smoke of prayers caught in people’s throats, the Kotel packed and God’s ears open. In the nearby distance, the mosque belts out its call- a dirge- and mothers, fathers, sons and daughters cry on the cold stones.

The forward march called Life Goes On: preparations for Shabbat. Hope wafting through the air on whiffs of challah, cholent, potato kugel, running through the tap water and flavoring the chicken soup, sticking to the soles of shoes as fathers and sons walk to shul.

I can hear their footsteps in the streets, a steady, ever-present beat, melding with the poetry that David hummed when he walked up and down the soft hills of Jerusalem, the battle hymns and psalms that the land was built upon, a conglomerate of tunes and melodies, coexisting in Jerusalem’s grand, bittersweet symphony.