Man on Al-Shifa Street

When you try to say with the utmost capacity for truthfulness what is really concerning you, you are offering prayer and being a poet at the same time.
                                                                         -Dorothy Sölle

Man on Al-Shifa Street
          -after Dorothy Sölle

I saw a man on Al-Shifa Street with a shovel
and a broom, carefully removing cinder,
plaster and dust from a ten-foot square of cut-stone,
between a collapsed hospital and the blackened
skeleton of an apartment block.

I saw sorrow sitting on the shoulders
of a man on Al-Shifa Street.
Wet streaks of weariness and ashes of grief
showed on his cotton waistcoat.

I saw a man on Al-Shifa Street standing,
broom in hand,
in a small meticulously cleaned piece of street;
and in that anointed square,
there was no evidence of war.

There are many ways to offer prayer.
I’d not seen this way before.