Discussing the War

Photo By Ezra Gut

Sometimes I go down to Sodom
to talk to Lot’s Wife
where she looks out at the Dead Sea

A solid block, she doesn’t usually respond,
but sometimes in the summer she sheds a salty tear,

“We must always look back,” she mutters one night,
As I sit with her, cooling down
from the double-bind passion she endures.
“Nothing is as questionable as the punishment
of an entire population for the malevolence of their leaders.
whether the population is just following them
to survive, or sharing their leaders’ evil.”

“We ladies in Sodom didn’t have a say
in those perversions of their menfolk,
but how could we separate from them?
The big question is – can you stop evil
without harming the good?”

I leave her like that,
frozen in her weeping,
and know
on the long trip home,
that I too have become salt.