A writer whose lines could “ambush with wonder
and wit”
saved me once. In the rugged hills outside Jerusalem,
I was reeling with sadness, as usual, my people
pressed like cattle
by sharp butts of Israeli guns, herded through battered lines, endlessly insulted,
(I wanted to fix it, always a problem, or translate us all into a better world),
when a guide climbed on our bus wearing
a FREE TIBET T-shirt.
Jim just looked at me. He saw it too.
“That’s thoughtful.”
Something cracked.
Sanity ambushed day after day. His kindness
made a calm place in my fury.
He drank a Pepsi. I seethed.
His words cool and angled, pieced together like triangles in a quilt stitched by the calm Amish.
Blue and green don’t fight.
Trust me. We have sunk so low in this valley of repetition we forgot how to sew a seam.
