The other day someone asked me where the name of the blog came from. It is based on a poem I wrote upon returning to the States after living in Jerusalem for two years while working on my MA in Historical Geography. For the title I was trying to think of a phrase that expressed the dichotomy one feels when surrounded by the beauty and conflict in the land. I thought of a picture I had taken while helping reinforce the barbed wire around our campus after a break-in. Here is the poem and the picture.
A year has gone by so fast
Like the passing of the dry
As clouds loom overhead
Ancient stones also loom
And then crack,
crumble,
fall
Rain has come and gone
Now hints of green are all that is left
People bustle, yell, and curse
Holiness remains in the whisper of the wind
Or the curl of smoke as censers clank
Similar to the weather and remnants of life
As the past is ever present and the future repeating
So my mind, my emotions, my being is in flux
Riding the spring gusts
Ever forward, ever higher
Being pounded into the gasping earth by winter torrents
But, it is this that makes me calm, at peace, enriched
Alone with my god
The brilliant hues in rose and red
Reflect
Off the humble waves
They shimmer and vacillate
Rise and are subdued by the gentle breeze
Sitting on a precipice, the edge of earth; looking out
A foreign, alien landscape expands before me until the horizon
The cliffs, jagged and intimidating,
Rise and fall like the storm-driven waves of the sea
Lastly and most amazing are the squares
Perfect in size and shape
A portal to days long gone
In these earthen boxes the dirt shifts color, silently
Subtly revealing the layers of time with the passing browns and grays
The land is a shape-shifter; it is the people that remain the same
The land is a siren, a seductress
Tempting some with pieces of stone and metal, others earth and water
It is this metathesis, this opposition to itself that is so appealing
Between land and people, even land and land
There is beauty in this collision
There is love in the razorwire
Roses and Razorwire 