Saturated Dreams Poem by gershon hepner

Saturated dreams
hang in the air,
while two faithful teams
compete in prayer.
Jews of Israel versus
Palestine,
validate with verses
thought divine,
one God they will not share
in their small region,
as if a God could care
about religion
if it divides Him in
the prayers that sat-
urate the mosque and syn-
agogue they’re at.
The city named for peace
is where they pray;
wonders never cease,
the prayers say.

Ethan Bronner (“Jews and Muslims Share Holy Season, ” NYT, September 29,2008) :
Inside a closed-off area of the Western Wall plaza a few hours earlier, four young men were studying Talmud, reading to one another rabbinic commentary about a prayer for rain that is said as the new year starts. What did they think of the coincidence of Jewish and Muslim prayers only yards from each other during these days? “The Muslims shouldn’t even be there, ” offered Haim Ben Dalak,18, of Petah Tikvah, who just started a year at a Jerusalem religious seminary before his army service. “There should be a Jewish temple there. That’s what we believe.”
Thirty years ago, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who knew this city as few others have, wrote:
The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities. It’s hard to breathe. The Hebrew name for the city, Yerushalayim, ends with “-ayim, ” a grammatical construction used for pairs of things. The device, known as a dual, exists in Hebrew and Arabic but few other languages. Which duality is being invoked has been lost to history, but it would not be hard to imagine that it is the one of heaven and earth, of holy and profane, and the difficulty of their coexisting. But of course everyone tends to focus on the holy.

9/29/08