‘True’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘falsehood’. LEVIATHAN, Thomas Hobbes
What better place to wait than on a balcony
facing east! Below are a narrow road,
a short promenade and two tidal inlets
divided by a jut of rock of ages –
jagged, steadfast! And what better day!
No sooner has the Haredi family –
who are renting the house on the headland –
finished bathing: females in one inlet
and males in the other – than a car arrives
with three male Jehovah’s Witnesses,
who sit on a bench overlooking the sea,
having set up a folding notice board,
and talk to each other, sometimes laughing.
And, not very long after they have gone,
a large, extended family of Muslims,
some of the women wearing hijabs, appears.
They are led by a man in late middle age.
He takes the whole party of twenty or so
away from the beach and up a track
and out of sight onto pastureland –
then he leads them back down, and this time
onto the shore where he has them pose,
with some difficulty, for a selfie.
Later, there is only the tides’ drift; the rise
and fall of seaweed on the jutting rocks;
a pair of cormorants flying westwards;
the dusk dimming the light on the sea;
the night falling slowly, uneasily.
Perhaps Leviathan is no more.
He was still alive in the Book of Job
where ‘Out of his nostrils goeth smoke,’
but in the Book of Isaiah God
‘with his sore…great…strong sword shall punish
Leviathan the piercing serpent…
he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea’.
Perhaps God is dead, and the beast came ashore
in the darkness while I was sleeping –
and, in my dreams, I mistook as lightning
its napalm breath, as thunder its bunker bombs,
as a flock of gulls rising in alarm
Gaza’s children screaming…
By David Selzer