Peter Eliastam

The searchlight of His star had led them far
Along the road to David’s Bethlehem.
The Child, knowing who His children are,
Gazed up in love and smiled to welcome them.
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My God! You hugged a Jew!
I can’t believe it God! You hugged a Jew!
My God! You hugged a Jew!
A poor pariah, hugely held in loving arms
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A pleasant garden bloomed below the hill
Beyond the temple at Jerusalem.
Contrasting with the cross-trees, gaunt and still,
Time’s ghoulish archetype of Yad vaShem.
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Smothered, the illusion manufactured
By a world of words, crackled into flame
On crumpled paper, scattering fractured
Fantasies, blackened by my dawn to shame.
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Another’s agony, a mother’s pain
Is all conjecture, an enclosed domain.
Words cling claustrophobic to the brain.
We sigh for language that can bear the strain.
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Shall we, this side of glory ever know
What each appointed trial here below
Accomplishes in us through chastening?
Love guards our crucibles, unhastening.
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And who could question or mistake the thing?
It felt as though a vagrant wind’s wing brushed
Our dormant senses to awakening
With terrible zeal, and zest of spice crushed.
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An easy target, shot at from the hip,
With sneer of scorn and curling of the lip.
Beyond accounting, tongue-lashed with a whip.
For this, it would appear, I have been born.
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Somewhere near the margin of our troubled mind
Your presence Lord, surpassing wonder, still surprises us.
We diffidently pause to ponder perfect love, whose cause
So alien to us, is far above our power to realise.
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To sense or sight, no hint of hope appears.
This solid night-long grieving liquefies
The dawn of yet another day to tears.
I lie bereft. Bereaving light denies
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Is this the goal of being? To be lost,
Forever worthless, and despite the cost
Of our redemption, damned to die unsaved,
Rejected for the way that Cain behaved?
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I asked Him, “What’s the colour of God? ”
“The colour of Light, ” He replied.
“And what’s the colour of my soul? ”
“The colour of Water, ” He gently answered.”
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The amplitudes of Heaven are Your throne,
The measureless expanding universe
Your footstool’s elemental microzone –
Created – held in check. No thoughts traverse
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Confusion
Died when Jesus Christ was crucified for sin.
And fission, after three days intermission,
Turned into eternal
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When apprehension starts to coalesce
With terror and our senses are embroiled
In rank unwillingness to acquiesce,
Accepting ground for which we have not toiled,
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Jewish history
Proves that less is more.
To gain the victory
We must loose the war.
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I see a cloud
Unclench it’s mist.
Atomic rain
Falls through the fingers
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Israel, foretold by wounding, world-room to himself denied,
Of desert wastes, and howling; hope hardly to be held in tremulous
Intrepid hands. Huge his desire, fireball gunned down, rose-bled and all
Life struck dumb, Yehudim bloom as blue as sapphires at Sharon,
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