What is this shady space hard abutting a doorway to that ancient stone synagogue? A square space inside three-foot high dry stack stone walls enclosing a weedy lawn. Two stone benches faced each other across the small clearing near an olive grove just outside Jerusalem, Israel. What am I doing here this evening? I don’t remember.

This stone bench is so very hard and cold and yet the temperature in this spot must be at least 90ºf. The ground is cool and damp as if the courtyard were weeping. What memories lie here? Are buried here?

I suddenly had a sense of something missing, something important, something dear. Ephemeral. Here and then gone, not even a diaphanous wisp. My memory faded and blended with the scene before me. I was quite alone. And then I was quite beside myself on that bench, as a soul divided in two.

I looked at this other me, a doppelgänger; it was weeping, and when it did, the earth itself shed soft tears into the weeds. I looked at it and was stricken with a profound sense of having missed something holy. I felt that I was merely a shell which I had inhabited my whole life, looking at a new part of me that seemed utterly alive and foreign and yet so terribly intimate as if it knew my heart. Its name was Love.

It wept, not seeming to sense my presence; yes a life of its own. And I so needed it to speak to me, to pour out its pain into that little courtyard until the tears flowed over those stone walls and out into the city of Jerusalem. To allow me to understand the depth of its despair. The Grief that lives in the very soil beneath this space.

Time did not exist. The tears did fill the courtyard and they anointed me; I became one with Love, no longer a shell. I grew the heart of a Lover and, alas, a Mourner.

My Love knew Israel. My Love is Israel. My Grief weeps for both.

Clyde is recently widowed and resides in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. He plays guitar and sings and hosts a weekly song circle on Zoom with local and international players. He started writing shortly after his partner passed away in 2023.