by Ilan Braun (Le Tour-du-Parc, Brittany, France)
There is no past or imperfect tense
In the Creator’s Utterance
Everything is present and perfect
What has been proclaimed at the Dawn of Time
Still rings hollow to our ears
The Creator cannot be ‘past’
He is beyond Time
Neither yesterday nor today nor tomorrow
He is the Fullness and the Unity of Time
The Whole, the Infinite
Continuum
He is permanent
He is “the” Permanence
At every billionth of a second of our lives
Within each heartbeat
HE IS!
Not human conjugations of Time
Futile and morbid
How to conjugate the time of God?
Just as we can not really explain the swelling of waves
Crashing on the shore
GOD is the first wave
Breaking on humanity
Its divine spray wetting our faces and our souls
Ilan Braun is a retired French journalist who wrote for L’Arche. A poet, writer, painter and amateur historian on the Holocaust and post-war Jewish clandestine immigration to Israel, he has lived in Israel and Australia and visited over 30 countries.
You can read more of his work in Labyrinthe poétique: De la terre au ciel (Publibook, Paris, 2009) and in English (“The Oak of Tears”) in Under One Canopy: Readings in Jewish Diversity, edited by Karen Primack (Kulanu Inc. Silver Spring, MD. 2003).
For more information about his work, visit: www.ilanbraun.dr.ag
The Jewish Writing Project 