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✦ 147 ✦ Miracle The way to Jerusalem filled Him with dread, The grief of forebodings for what lay ahead. The scrub on the hillside was prickly and dry; The air was so hot, and the reeds barely stirred; No chimney smoke rose from a hovel nearby; The Dead Sea lay placid, its face undisturbed. As bitter at heart as the sea’s bitter load, Attended by only a small band of clouds, He walked without rest on the dust-covered road To greet His disciples who waited in town. And as He considered the life He had known, An odor of wormwood pervaded the plain. Then stillness descended. He stood there alone, The landscape all prostrate, as if in a faint; And everything blended: the desert, the steam, The lizards and wellsprings, the gullies and streams. A fig tree arose on the pathway ahead, All branches and leaves, with no fruit on the bough; He spake to it, saying: “What profiteth thou? What joy canst thou give, if thy limbs be like lead? “I hunger and thirst, and yet barren thou art, More cheerless to meet than a granite-eyed gaze; How loathsome to offer no kindness of heart! But so shalt thou be till the end of thy days.” ✦ 148 ✦ The tree felt the verdict of doom like a lash And trembled like lightning descending a rod, Then flamed for an instant and withered to ash. Oh even right then had they not been so blind— Those branches and leaves, the trunk and the root— The laws of all nature might well have proved kind. For miracles happen, proceeding from God. When all is confusion, whenever we stray, A miracle, stunning us, shows us the way. ...

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