Canaan

The answer is yes. Real, too,
the mosque behind and, still behind,
the vacant lots which pock this flattened
site of another epic battle for Jaffa.
Tel Aviv’s U.N.E.S.C.O-prized White City
is crumbling back to ochre, its stacks
of curve-cornered Bauhaus stucco cubes
remnants of pre-Shoah social Zionism lodged
on a shore of Canaan, against which
a nervous sea hurls roiling rows of surf
which curl and crash and surge, subsiding
in foam, as waves do, human or not.

*

Now a strangely topical poem, but one written in 2009 during a visit to Tel-Aviv. My attention was attracted by the above grafitto, itself a kind of concrete poem of phatic permutation, upon which topic I published my first critical piece lo! many ages ago. Get it here: From the Pictograph to the Metapoem, 1979.