The opening quote from Tommy Olofsson indicates that the poem “Jerusalem” is essentially about love. It suggests that when people love one another, they hurt when the other person hurts. This is a theme throughout the poem.

The title of this poem draws attention to its location. Historically, Jerusalem is important to three different religious groups—Jews, Muslims, and Christians. They all have the city in common as the center of religious stories and relics. These individual claims have historically led to violence, but this commonality also reinforces the potential unity among factions that have historically conflicted with one another.

The first two lines, “I’m not interested in / who suffered the most” (Lines 1-2), address an unspoken belief that people indeed compete as to who can claim the mantle of suffering, and that the people who have suffered the most have more rights than those who have suffered less. In the first stanza, the speaker dismisses arguments about suffering and tries to focus the reader on the act of “getting over it” (Line 4) and forgiveness. This leads to her anecdote about her father, who was accidentally hit on the head by a friend attempting to throw a rock at a bird.