Four times an hour the building

Shudders, and still jolts her,

Yet the hurly-burly below

Holds her gaze through the rain-

Flecked window, first with the screech

Of sorrow as the train brakes,

Then with the flood of commuters

Who flow—heads-bowed—  

like an ink-spill into the station.

But her mind is on a range of hills,

Heavenly hills, where shafts of light

Streak through towering cedars

Gifted, in the beginning, to Lebanon,

By God, and whose broken branches

Are no longer a sign of His judgement,

But tipi shelters for teens smoking weed.

Sanctuary hills,

Whose vaulted bone structure is as ancient

As Time; immutable, like laws of nature,

Whose garrigue and caves hold

Faith-driven ghosts fleeing bloody crusades,

And now, cosset modern hearts like hers,

Who, broken by loss, and fearful thoughts

Find rehab in Mother Earth.

Challenging hills,

On whose sky-line height she picks through

Wild herb and box, to teeter with winged

Arms on a limestone outcrop, and draws

Into her lungs fierce breath

From the Mistral – an angel of death

Who whips her forward and hurls overboard

Scented squalls of thyme and gorse.

Illuminating hills,

Whose jaw-dropping geology shakes

Down the import of her personal tales,

Humbling her. For what is she next

to the plunging scale of history and slopes —

Whose archive spills in castles, spires,

And cubist roofs around their foothills?

Bewitching hills,

Whose woolly coat of oak shifts with the light,

from slate, to blue, and to black-green when

Shadows sleep, whose dawn mists envelope,

Like twisted gauze ribbon the lower slopes,

And in whose most buxom fold,

Exhibits, like art, a dark heart,

In the harsh winter glow.

Hills of home,

Carved, on her refuge memory

Like the shrine in the rock

Under the bent pine, so that

In stress and setback her mind

Can trace a boar’s stony track on top

of the world, where low valley lines

Make shipshape patchwork

Of cherry orchards,

Olives, lavender and vines.