Absalom’s Pillar, 1949

Didn’t imagine barbed wire fences. That the heart of a tree could bleed. Didn’t imagine I’d be dispossessed of the pillar hewn out of rock, that I’d be driven away from the enemy’s market—ceramics, brass trays, narghils. On the threshold I stood, in love

with your thick hair, Absalom, your beauty unblemished from head to foot, your valor, audacity, chariot, horses. “My father, My father,” you cried, “how lonely my house, like an orphan I am, a vassal, no longer a prince in your eyes.”

Sad the windmill turned by a woeful wind. Sad the tree’s blinded blossoms. But sometimes, in a silent evening, when the haughty pillar mourns behind a thousand moss-covered walls, and absence is much more than death, a flash of conciliation amid the mourning flares up and takes hold.