Sometimes, a poem or piece of prose lends itself to the lyrical nature of music. Please enjoy listening to Alicia Vandevorst’s “Jerusalem Now” on Soundcloud.–Ed. 

In May of 2018, the US decided to move its embassy to Jerusalem. This symbolic move heightened for me the ongoing rivalry over that ground and what it represents. That specific power attributed to that specific place, I believe, can be encountered elsewhere, anywhere, by the person with a sensitive heart. When Blake calls us to build Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant Land”, I hear him calling for humanity to recognize the presence of Jerusalem within itself. Why fight over a holy place anymore? Why be bound by such limiting stories? Instead we could tell the story of peace to ourselves.

And see her wild hair is the wind, the day of crossed scents on the hill adorns her as here blows feral rosemary, daphne and rose, and bitter hawthorn and musty broken leaves, and tar fumes and snot and semen and musk glands of snakes and the sweat of the city and the depleted country, the bitters of smoke. She, Jerusalem, will greet her lover, anywhere.

Smell her hands within the fire, in the bakery, in the gym, the court, the temple. She is the field of scent devoid of preference. See her newly woven gown like the table, the bed, the screen. See her heaving every sinusoid. She is the field of vision devoid of preference. Touch her wherever your blood flows and however your skin pricks. Hear her bridal shudder, louder, louder, into words and meandering sounds. She feeds herself to you, anything at your lips can be known as Jerusalem. You choose to savor her in a limited way as your own flesh or as every body.

This Jerusalem of every city, her flesh of every sidewalk, is unveiled to the gentlest footfalls, to those who know she’s there. And they shake and shudder freely anywhere. And wail or kneel or sing or do what they must do, but with an undeterred smile, these lovers.

And does she stand, shimmering at the southern border? White gown in the red dirt that we tread on the bridge, she, the damsel who some fight the dragon-immigrants as if to save, stands among the immigrants, unseen by the newest patrol. A shimmer like heat, she waits with us. She, the mothers and fathers who shade their children with their bodies, whose sweat anoints them. She is the shiver through the mind that checks fear, that opens the way for care at 9 AM at 9:15 then at 10 at noon at midnight at 9 AM again.

And the patrolling soldiers hear her cries— the children in cages cry mama, mama! In their skin, the agents feel the urge to stoop, to sacrifice their badges and stoop and gather them into their arms and find, through mazes of paper and questions and walking and apologies, their mothers, their fathers, the child’s Jerusalem. But they lie to cover the urges. They call the children instruments played, an orchestra, then a bunch of horns to silence. But that is Jerusalem, the beloved place, mislaid, misconceived, abandoned at the altar. A different knot tied.

And is she revealed in the loose gowns of jellyfish that hover where the ocean dies? Is she regal in the clutter of satellites and trash within the planetary orbit?

Does she stride forward across the cleared Amazon with cow hooves round her neck? Or with the slowed atmospheric river like a draping boa? None of these are her wedding gown. These mark how we refuse her, but still she exists, jangling the trash and trashed like a mirror-gown that catches our eye like nagging, or as an echo catches the ear and makes you attentive. You want to find her, even there. You want to shed the blindness of suffering and set aside demands and see her. You want to go to Jerusalem. You want a place to kneel. A pure place. Her bridal descent. A place without any contaminant, not even a trace of pollution. Not a jot of separation. The site of reunion.

And now if the bride emerges, Jerusalem, in every city, on every lane, and the dingy wastes we amassed erupt as art as she emerges, like butterflies the dark, sullen heaps will develop into apologies: Kodachrome valances of plastic, pillars of marbled plastic from melted straws, prosthetic arms from salvaged waste, microbes we cultivate will eat the traces and the cleaned ocean will sway and bask and grow new swaths of plankton.