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# “Next year in Jerusalem”: three poems
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article-1812jsp/
- Published: 2004-03-25T00:03:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-17T11:12:44.000Z
- Author: Adam Horovitz
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:08, #ImagesUploaded

![Adam Horovitz](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/adamhorovitz_anFmetI-1776424225094.jpg)

Adam Horovitz

*Adam Horovitz*

**Married to the body (i)**

Blood, like music,  
 links back into itself,  
rich with the thought-threads  
 of generations.

In the blood,  
haemoglobin sings like fire  
 dancing on the rooftops.

DNA shivers and spirals  
 through veins,  
mournful as clarinets.

Blood is a hurtling music  
 married to the body.

There is no ghetto in blood.  
  
“My own hope is that, next year, everyone will be able to celebrate freedom in Jerusalem, be they Jew, Christian, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or other. We are all fellow humans. I stand firmly behind the closing line of the poem that opens the sequence: *There is no ghetto in blood*.” (Adam Horovitz)

**My Invisible Aunt (iii)**

An aunt I’ve never seen in the flesh  
lurks in my grandmother’s kitchen  
perhaps communing with the kosher sausages.  
She is avoiding me.

I had always suspected her of not existing  
despite glimpsing photographs  
of her with my vanished Rabbi uncle,  
whose existence I also had to take on trust.

The sight of her half-remembered face  
repeated like a smudged photocopy  
in inquisitive men who said they were her sons  
eventually proved her to be real

But that was long ago and tonight I am  
being moved like a chess piece  
from room to room in an effort to preserve  
the kosher space around my invisible aunt.

My grandmother smiles regretfully,  
divides herself between the ghettos  
my unseen aunt creates.  
“She is very orthodox,” my grandmother explains.

I smile politely and wonder if,  
thanks to this careful separation,  
my invisible aunt envisages me  
as half-Jew meat or watered milk

or just as unclean animal, as pig.  
I am tempted to burst through the curtains  
and confront her – but she’s far from being a vicar  
and the noises off in this sorry farce

are those of bigotry run riot,  
of prayer and weakness,  
and of the foundations of her god’s house  
shifting in the sand she built them on.

Also in **openDemocracy**, [two poems](https://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=1725) from the “transmedial crusader” Michael Horovitz and a profile by Candida Clark; for Michael and Adam (and Frances) Horovitz, see [“Writing in the Family”](http://www.bathlitfest.org.uk/event.php?show=42&ref=opendemocracy.net)

**(ix) Next Year in Jerusalem**

Next year in Jerusalem  
 politicians will put down roots  
 they can't pull up,  
 and wither into roadside shrubs.

Next year in Jerusalem  
 it will be the Egyptians' turn  
 to run away and hide in the desert  
 whilst the Israelis avert their eyes  
 and count to twenty.

Next year in Jerusalem  
 generals will keep finding  
 sheep tangled in bushes  
 whenever they attempt  
 to send in the troops.

Next year in Jerusalem  
 an old man with a large beard  
 will walk backwards through a hall of mirrors,  
 chanting,  
 dressed only in fig leaves.

Next year in Jerusalem  
 there will be no guns,  
no bombs, no blood-blind eye-for-an-eyes -

only doves  
 pecking hard at olive branches,  
 and rainbows lurking on street corners  
 touting hope.  

Adam Horovitz’s three poems on **openDemocracy** are from his collection *Next Year in Jerusalem* ([HooHah Press, 2004](http://www.stetpress.co.uk/hoohahpress.htm?ref=opendemocracy.net))