Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I strain to hear
your prayers
in the song of the wind in the olive trees

some 2000 years old
fed by stingy minerality of rocky soil
fed by the millions of buried prayer slips
paper and ink disappearing
leaving only the voiced pleadings
of those who pilgrim to Jerusalem
offer up supplication, blessing, gratitude
hopes so deep they have never been shaped by
lips and tongue and breath
dared to be written on a shred of paper
letters formed small and careful
a covert act willfully denying
the public facade of unbelieving
because what if, just what if,
there is a Voice that hears
my tender cries?

 
What if, just what if,
I have never been as alone as I feel
and it is not an act of foolishness
to scrawl my deepest longings
on paper I fold again and again
to scan the ancient limestone blocks
for the spot already crowded with wisps of yellow and white and green
into which I nestle my little origami offering
with a kiss to cold stone
to back away slowly
lift my eyes and see
the colony of black birds nesting high in the stone crevices?

 
No less an act of faith
to lay eggs
or to place paper
Common swift fledglings
and common longings
incubating and nourishing each other
until both are ready to take wing.
Nature, as it will, calls us all to leave
the birthplace of sacred silent longings.

 
My prayers are no longer in the Wall.
Nor are yours, Dad – they have long since been removed
swept with a broom sanctified by the task
taken to the Mount of Olives
sacred scrolls and holy scraps of paper
laid to eternal rest in stone mounds
consecrated by relentless desert sun.

 
What might you have written
the times you stood before the Kotel
wrapped in prayer shawl
head bowed?
Did you ask for relief from pain?
For help carrying your burdens?
For love?
For forgiveness?

 
Did you feel your smallness –
one stooped-by-life man before giant stones 6 stories high
and the immeasurable space of 6 million stories untold?
Once you were a daughter’s giant
until I made you small and supplicant outside my wall.

 
It is of course too late to ask you.
Instead I stand at the gravesite
feel the sacred weight and ephemeral lightness
of thousands of years of prayers
released from material and corporeal limits
the inevitable disappearing and undoing
of all that has taken living form
by the true giants of time and decay
hoping to distill your private longings
from the sacred commingling
a symphony of longing with strains from all
who beseeched a child
who entreated a cure
who pleaded for peace
who begged for love
who sought another chance
who meditated for confusion to clear
who dreamed of the end of loneliness
who sought entry into the walled off heart of a hurt child
who, like me, prayed for a cracked-open space in a heart of stone
where all I exiled would return home to roost.