By Mary Rudge

With this bead, remember the roots,

how deep in the earth their history entwines,

your race, mine, ancestors bones.

This bead from olive wood, polished by wind

ancient before time began, where community

of insects shelter in trees, is for our home, stone

by stone, piled together, the convent, the cloister,

the chapel, the hospital, the hovels of the poor we

know well, the rich with their marble floors and

shimmering tapestries I have never seen.

This bead connects us, families making rosaries.

in Bethlehem, in Jerusalem.

This thread is for holding together community, country.

This decade is finished now, after all the decades.

Let us each prayer tell on the beads of the rosaries we

sell for food, for medicine, for all these that we care

for so they may live. These people (poorer than we who

have vow of poverty), Sorrowful Mysteries, poorer than we.

They know hunger and fear. Joyful Mysteries, for all that

sustains us, earth, sky, water, oasis, the sand grains, the

night wind, the heat, the stillness, the stars.

Rosary circle of countries like beads on a linked chain.

Israel, circled by chain of linked places, people, each a bead,

tell the deed that connects us: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza.

How the Pharaohs, Egyptians, Canonites, Jews, Philistines, Turks,

the Crusaders, Kurds, Assyrians, Persians, Berbers, Saladin,

other invaders, (and then the British) co-mingled.

Say the Luminous Mysteries, in communion of need on the crossroads

of travel, trade, international communion, silk and spice. How the

sun light made figs, dates, oranges, saffron, cardamom.

Just out the window, the wall has a circle of bullet holes.

Bomb fragments pock-mark the dirt where the suicide-martyr

blew himself up among people come for prayer.

Few nuns remain here. Sister Mary Dominic bows her head and

goes on with her work, making olive wood rosaries for Palestine.