Umm Qais in Springtime

I stood on the hill’s ridgeway

Paved with long trod flagstones

And my mind reached out

Across the Jordan and beyond.

It touched the stones of cursed Jericho

Where ten thousand years of souls still sleep

Beneath the crumbled walls

Waiting for another trumpet.

It reached the plains on which a Pharaoh’s dreams were wrecked

And smelled the rotten blood of Moloch.

It saw the ray of man’s hope

Rising from the ancient abattoir

To walk on Galilee beneath the gaze of Rome.

On the road to Damascus, north

Rode saints and sinners, madmen

And the abomination of desolation

Grinding the confused and stricken Greeks

Beneath unshod hooves.

And more and ever more

Faces dark and pale push past.

The whispered tumult of humanity confuses this place.

The mute ghosts in the amphitheater

Watch a play riven in two

By the hand of which God.

I brought you to this place

To touch the immensity of time

Into which the brief light of our souls is cast,

And to hold you in my arms a moment

Before the last angel comes

Filling the western sky with his wings

To sweep us from this place into eternity.