“Allah is the light. Within the lamp a brilliant star lit by a blessed tree, an olive tree, neither of the East nor of the West whose oil is well nigh, luminous though fire scarce touched it; Light upon Light!”
– from the Koran –
Gethsemane: The Burden of Light
David’s seizure of Jerusalem by storm not, but by stealth;
His commandos into Gihon and up to arborescent wealth
As Olympia, the Holy See,
And all places such
Born of ideals,
Born of distress,
Not for this world’s truth and egress
But for essence – the steam that rises from man’s perspiration
In labor and fear –
The courage that mortifies enough to hold dear
A mere shave of Jonah’s gourd,
The cross of wood,
An extrapolated nation where fruited promise stood
Steaming,
Seething,
Praying,
Teething
On the very bark from whence incense –
The essence of man – rises,
From whence peace surprises,
And justice prevails,
And divine unction is ministered to all that ails.
And all ails;
Indeed, the mitzvah is pain;
What Titus destroyed perpetuates again,
And again and again,
Both hope and despair
With Tetzaveh burning,
Ner tamid in lair.
The olive tree, wrote Pliny, never dies;
Faith endures to absolve mortal lies,
Which heap themselves like dirt
Over tombs of fallen olives;
Time exhumes for rediscovery, for understanding
Of what NOW is demanding:
Confrontation without escape,
For one in the same, the olive and the grape
In their yield of blood from agony’s press
Transfused through globally civil unrest;
Hence, the rosaries, stone mysteries,
Preserve wisdom’s Fall;
The olive stones of Gethsemane are hardest of all.
– Mary Jo Magar –