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21 pages 42 minutes read

Jerusalem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994

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Poem Analysis

Analysis: “Jerusalem”

The opening quote from Tommy Olofsson indicates that the poem “Jerusalem” is essentially about love. It suggests that when people love one another, they hurt when the other person hurts. This is a theme throughout the poem.

The title of this poem draws attention to its location. Historically, Jerusalem is important to three different religious groups—Jews, Muslims, and Christians. They all have the city in common as the center of religious stories and relics. These individual claims have historically led to violence, but this commonality also reinforces the potential unity among factions that have historically conflicted with one another.

The first two lines, “I’m not interested in / who suffered the most” (Lines 1-2), address an unspoken belief that people indeed compete as to who can claim the mantle of suffering, and that the people who have suffered the most have more rights than those who have suffered less. In the first stanza, the speaker dismisses arguments about suffering and tries to focus the reader on the act of “getting over it” (Line 4) and forgiveness. This leads to her anecdote about her father, who was accidentally hit on the head by a friend attempting to throw a rock at a bird.

Shihab Nye introduces her father, saying, “[o]nce when my father was a boy / a stone hit him on the head” (Lines 5-6). The speaker does not focus on the boy who hit her father with the stone. By foregrounding her father, she takes focus away from the wrongdoer and places it onto the person who reacts, or in this case, on the one who chooses not to react or seek revenge. This puts the attention on forgiving and moving on, as her father does in this anecdote.

The speaker also notes that “[h]air would never grow there” (Line 7), referencing the place where the rock hit her father. This may be a literal fact, but it also has metaphorical implications. The lack of hair serves as a constant reminder of the event, the wound it left, and the fact that “the boy who [had] fallen / [stood] up” (Lines 9-10). The “getting up” is also an emblem of somebody “getting over it” (Line 4). When the speaker notes that “[t]he pears are not crying” (Line 12), she gives the reader a hint of the ethics the boy grew up with in his home. The boy learns there is no need to cry. It shows a toughness he learns from nature (the pears). The speaker continues this idea in writing that the father starts “growing wings” (Line 15) when he learns his friend threw the stone at a bird. Rather than growing wounded, the boy grows stronger, more powerful, and able to adopt a body part that only birds have. At the same time, he grows as stoic as the pears he sees at his home.

In the third stanza, Shihab Nye writes, “[e]ach carries a tender spot: / something our lives forgot to give us” (Lines 16-17), suggesting that every person has been hurt or denied in some way. This furthers her argument that the people in conflict are essentially the same, both wounded, both hurting. It also extends the poem to all people, to not just those living in Jerusalem but those watching the fighting or those fighting other battles. The next few lines demonstrate how all people look for ways to heal themselves or compensate for what they’ve lost. “A man builds a house” (Line 18), “[a] woman speaks to a tree” (Line 20), and a child paints a picture. All of these represent ways that people “get over” their hurt and move forward, not seeking revenge or engaging in acts of destruction. Instead, they create something new—a house, new fruit, a piece of art.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker contrasts this “getting over it” (Line 4) with its opposite—continuing to be at war. She depicts the “[s]oldiers [stalking] a pharmacy” (Line 28), noting that “it’s ridiculous” (Line 31). These are the people not moving on because they are “slow” (Line 27) to realize how futile it is to go to war or to keep fighting. Instead, Shihab Nye notes in the fifth stanza that “there’s a place in my brain / where hate won’t grow” (Lines 32-33). This is the speaker refusing to engage in a desire for vengeance. Instead, she focuses on “wind, and seeds” (Line 34), which suggests movement and growth. Wind takes certain seeds to find a new place to grow, which parallels her father’s leaving Palestine to plant himself in America. The “something” (Line 35) that pokes her and us may be a desire for creating something new or a premonition of what is yet to come. The word “pokes” (Line 35) also mimics seedlings poking through the dirt as they emerge from the soil.

The last line of the poem, which stands alone as a stanza, is especially important: “It’s late but everything comes next” (Line 36) is again a call to the reader. Like the first stanza which states directly that the speaker is interested in “getting over it” (Line 4), this last line suggests there are many possibilities for moving forward. The vagueness of the term “everything” (Line 36) suggests that what comes next could be either positive or negative, but it also suggests that it is all-encompassing. It isn’t just the next step that comes next but everything, meaning how people choose to react to the past is “everything” (Line 35). How people choose to react to the injury is more important than the injury itself.

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