jesus pope and babies
Originally uploaded by tijo.
a found poem
This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem,
but this is how you enter now.
You wait
at the wall, three stories high, thorned
with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel
as if you're at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed
with assault rifles examine your papers. They search
your vehicle.
No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed
in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out.
If you're cleared to enter, a sliding steel door grinds
open. The soldiers step aside, and you drive
through the temporary gap in the wall. Then the door slides
back, squealing on its track, booming shut.
You're in Bethlehem.
The city, at the scrabbly hem of the Judaean desert, is built
over several broad, flat-topped hills, stingy
with vegetation. The older homes are made
of pale yellow stone, wedged
along steep, narrow streets. A couple of battered taxis ply
the roads, drivers heavy
on the horns. At an outdoor stall, lamb meat rotates
on a spit, dripping fat. Men sit on plastic chairs and sip
from small glasses of thick Arabic coffee. There's an odor
of uncollected garbage. As you work your way up the hill, you can see
the scope of the wall and chart its ongoing expansion
A gray snake, segmented by cylindrical guard towers, methodically
constricting the city.
From Michael Finkel’s Bethelehem 2007 in the December issue of National Geographic
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