I lock eyes with the man hanging out of the hotel window.
His arm grasps the sill, the other waves in the breeze.
A cigarette hangs, precariously, on red lips.
a glance to the right reveals another man, cigarette clutched in teeth, farther to the right, another.
every window of the third, fourth and fifth floor, another man.
a hundred men, each to his own room, each to his own window.
the overwhelming cigarette smoke consumed us as we stood, looking up at them,
they peered down at us.
each man, in quarantine for a virus.

the New York Times said the virus has driven us apart.
here, these men gathered together. At a distance, between their windows
they joked, laughed, wisps of Hebrew drifting down from the third story.
one man sat on a fire escape, reading.
another man stood, adidas tracksuit, speaking Arabic on his phone.
took a virus to bring the Nusseibeh’s and Oz’s of Jerusalem together, perhaps.
but they were still divided.
in a window to the far right, a Haredi woman stood alone. It was closed, but she too looked out from behind a dirty windowpane, wig under black knit hat, white telephone to her ear.

all these descendants of Abraham, infected together, standing apart.
when it came time for evening prayers, the Lev Yerushalayim hotel became Isaiah’s house of prayer for all peoples, a diseased temple on the mount.