Temple thoughts

Every night you
Walked up to our home
from Hampstead, High Street, up

the cobbled streets up
past the Mary Poppins chimneys
to

East Heath Road, & our home
#10 Lady Well Court, a pink house, till
knees and body fail then

the 268 bus carried us two

Jesus walked

every night after teaching

you were in your temple
you, dead with the tiredness
of a NYC South Bronx teacher
in June (perhaps they are spent
as you had to be?) spent as a
Widow’s mite

and then rich
Pharisees, teachers of the law,
Sadducees, disciples,
questions, empty hearts,
eyes and ears
people stealing and hoarding

all trying to fill
themselves

You walked up
The Mount of Olives
every night

still a steep steep climb
did you sing? Listen to the breeze? Look only at
your feet, your hands?

when we walked by your
steps

Priscilla held the wall and the handrail steep but then we climbed down

driven up by a Palestine cab driver who when ‘I said take me where you would go in Jerusalem’
Drove to top of the Mount

He said ‘I’ll see you at the bottom in two hours.’

Two hours’-pause-
‘Walk.’

we walked at the day’s break.
Two hours to reach the bottom, the Garden of Gethsemane. A throng of peoples; a garden of olive trees; fence around. We walked, stood, cried silent tears.

You couldn’t walk up the night before you passed’ …he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, ‘he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”
They slept. You sweated blood.

We had climbed down your Mount the dawn of our first Jerusalem day.
Our driver was there.

You had one more cross to climb; but
Not that night.

but You had climbed up after, as day light fades

at the end of your days teaching at the temple

I can, could, see and feel, you resting on your way

the sun would have been setting
the temple and Jewish hill top
graves are white facing a hot sun.

these graves face the temple so that they would rise first when the Messiah comes

they were looking the wrong way.