SONG OF THE LADDER

When you climb up the ladder

You see more

When you climb up the ladder

You remember what matters

To everyone.

When you climb up the ladder

You see more and more and more.

And from there you spread a blanket

Over everyone.

–Hamutal Bar-Yosef   

WRITTEN ON THE PATH IN NACHALIM

Sometimes I get the urge to go into politics,

the last thing I seem to be cut out for,

but it comes to me, like the urge to crochet an afghan

-- you know, a granny afghan, all those patches

each with its own center, its own color scheme,

all of them stitched together in such a way

that there seems to be an overall design.

That is, I think of putting people together

the way you put words together in a poem.    

This is a wild idea I have harbored

for upwards of forty years now, though I’ve yet

to convince anyone it might actually be done.

For one thing, who’s going to draw the overall design?

And then, for people to be fitted into it,

they’d first have to consent to be picked up.

I keep thinking someday it will just appear to everyone

in the sky, on some clear morning after rain,

and then gently settle down, until we’re all in it

(with the Temple in the middle, of course!).

–E. Kam-Ron