| |
Last year I spent some days in Kiryat Shmona in northern Galilee.
This is near where the many sources of the Jordan spurt out of the foothills
of Mount Hebron; near, too, to where the Katyusha rockets were falling
this summer. It is a bountiful beautiful green land, rich in agriculture
— the source of those little packets of cut herbs you can so easily
pick up in the supermarket — and one reason why these abundant waters
shrink to a trickle before they reach the Dead Sea. It is a place also
carefully demarcated with 'mined areas'. You can see helicopter gunships
hovering over the Golan. But you might also spot an eagle or glimpse the
russet Syrian hyrax sunning on a rock; and you can hear the children from
the kibbutz file laughing along the river path, led and followed by an
armed guard.
I was in search, those spring days, of the ancient shrine to Pan. His
worship flourished here for hundreds of years, specifically close to the
spot where Jesus founded his own religion ('And upon this rock I will
build my Church'). And a stone's throw from Pan's grotto is the tomb of
Nabi al-Khadr, the Green Man sacred to the Druze, who still practise their
secretive religion in these hills. Down country is the place Jesus delivered
the Sermon on the Mount, and beyond it flickers the Sea of Galilee.
I'd read how this was the territory allotted in the Old Testament to
the Tribe of Dan, the most pagan of the Israelites. There is a strong
tradition they founded Arcadia — and I could at least surmise (pace
Robert Graves) that they had a connection with the Tuatha de Danaan, the
mythic inhabitants of Ireland. I was enjoying the scenery and being, you
might say, suspiciously close to what could be called a poetry tourist
in the temporary peace.
For it was here, this past summer, in a particularly bloody incident
that a rocket killed a group of Israeli reservists. Given the disproportionate
violence of the time, one couldn't but feel for a moment that maybe 'they
deserved it' — but I remembered then the teenage soldiers who crowded
the bus from Tel Aviv, and the young woman from the B and B, the same
age as my daughter, who was 'going in the military' this year.
Poetry notoriously 'makes nothing happen' — it cannot prevent such
things.
And yet surely we are better for the moral amplitude and for the tenets
— however idealistic, however unrealized in the very territory where
they were formulated — of the Sermon on the Mount. Better, too,
that the imagination created and continues to renew our yearning for Arcadia,
for our pleasure in water, in little animals, in the tickles and scratches
of Eros, not to mention the leers and grunts of the dancing goat-men.
There are no goat-men, exactly, in the following pages — but a
surprising proportion of the poems show a near-erotic attentiveness to
the natural world. They create a space where we can hear the intimate
work of nature as well as the whop of the rotary blades. The issue begins
with what seems most necessary, an incantation and prayer for water.
|