Need sixty pounds of stuffing for the Octoberfeast? A ride to your dentist appointment sixty miles away? All-day help in the soup kitchen every third Wednesday? Overseeing the kitchen at the monthly music coffeehouse? Organizing the Lions’ annual charity golf tournament? All my life I’ve witnessed neighbors and friends and strangers doing this kind of unsung work. Some people donate money and then there are the people like my mother, and my father until he died, who also wade in knee deep to fill the plates and then wash the plates, brew the coffee and then pour the coffee, welcome the new babies, slip a $20 in their graduation cards eighteen years later, and stand in line in dark clothes to say goodbye when the time comes. We’re all walking to the same place.

Walking to Jerusalem, by Philip Terman

Pedometer attached to her belt, your mother, spry and strong
at eighty, joins the other Methodist Church members
in calculating the 5,915 miles, no matter the weather, to add up
all the way from Linesville, Pennsylvania to Jerusalem.
They need not worry about miracles or pausing
at the signs of the cross. They need not stop for security
to check their purses for weapons. They need no visa
nor baggage, no money to exchange for shekels, no guide-
book, no guide. They need no ancient tongue or prophecies.
They are, simply, day by day, walking, mile after mile:
the sink to the table, uptown to the post office, down
the block to visit the sick neighbor. Sundays to and from church.
And when they walk far enough, adding up their pedometers
together, they will arrive in Jerusalem. And keep walking.

For more information on Philip Terman, please click here. This poem first appeared in Our Portion: New and Selected Poems, published in 2015 by Autumn House Press.