Walls do not stay gray for long, here.

Someone always comes with paint, with photographs, with red anemones bent from metal, with a name they are afraid the world will stop saying out loud.

Blank space becomes charged in the sun of the Otef. I can almost feel the pleasant October weather on my skin, under a sky so blue, as if it’s impossible that anything horrific could have happened here.

My eyes catch the white birds painted along the separation wall. At first their flight looks hopeful, a flock lifting upward together. But something inside me shifts, and I realize how they are still trapped inside the outline of the wall itself, flight sketched onto the permanence of cement, freedom drafted inside the structure  of tall, grey fear.

Further down, butterflies scatter themselves across the gray slabs, in mismatched children’s colors, small wings crossing the same barrier built to stop bodies,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)