Poem: Close to the Monegros' Desert, By Barzilai

Poem:  Close to the Monegros’ Desert

He stood with his arms crossed on the left bank of the small river.  He was covered by unnumbered shadows falling down from the birch trees.  He was looking straight ahead over the peaceful stream of water, while being told about the strength of his arms.  While hearing those words, the sunlight started to fall on his eyes, and had to close them with a feeling of satisfaction. 
 
Then in his mind’s eye, he appeared on an inhospitable terrain, on a desolate landscape of bare hills not far from where he was, and the scribe of his birth.  Bare and stony hills traversed by veins of salt protecting dried up tortured stream beds.
 
Then the sky starts to get dark, walking among thorns, and isolated bushes dozing in shadows.  Immersed in silence and nostalgia as if yearning for something unknown?  He opened his eye, and the yellowy horizon crowned with rosy clouds draw a brilliant reflecting picture on it.  The sun had been born in the east and was dying in the west.
 
Here there are no walls of a temple, or even a Temple, but an infinite sea of bared salty slopes and milky steep hillsides.  The rain had dug a narrow and twisted gorge of abrupt walls in front of him.  Definitely it is not the Jordan, but it is here, however.
 
The desolate mountains in the Neguev, the dried up streambed of the Nahal-Perazim, the Monegros' desert, and the Alcubierre mountain chain...the Ara wadi, and the Ara river, so far and so close to each other!
 
He was walking in that desolation at sunset.  He was dragging his soul on that stony terrain.  He was under the sky indicating the fall of the light and the prelude of darkness.  He strained his eyes looking for someone across the overwhelming immensity, but nobody was there either close or far away.

Barzilia Benklawer Kellajer