POEM: 'Rockets Falling'
and the melon field drinks the cup of wrath.
I go from room to room,
weighing my conscience,
and stop by the window to look at the view.
The river is calm, a boat or two.
Melons, unpicked, are on fire, leaving
black scars. A kid’s kite on a winged
wind disappearing in smoke.
POEM: 'Untitled, Jerusalem, 2002'
You are captives of illusion,
experts in eluding truth, you party, drink wine,
pick anemone in spring.
POEM: 'Gaza'
Scrawny goats limp on heaps of rubble,
the sea — under weights of sorrow.
Nowhere to go, she says, escaping
the bombs with her wounded child.
And the child guarded
by ten silent angels who weep.
POEM: 'Soldiers, Israel, 2014'
For Dina
POEM: 'The Great Dying'
He gathered his friend’s dead flesh,
walked back and sat in a field reciting a psalm.
Kneeling, he signaled the signs of courage
and defeat with his bloody fingers,
each sign for each heart beat before the great dying.
An instinctive act, he ruminates.
He sounds the psalm like a warning bell,
befuddled by what he had done, unexpectedly,
chasing death in an everlasting tunnel,
an unending struggle to choose between
life and death, the blessing and the curse,
bonded like separate and one twin mountains.
POEM: 'Neighbors'
If only I’d climb over the fence
and step into my neighbor’s
grove of almonds, stealthily put
my ear against his window
listening closely to Farid
and his oud, and think
of his ancestors as mine, and
remember him coming
from Mecca with his green flag
for my son’s birth, if only
we’d sit together under
the garden’s broad-leaved tree,
unknowing religion and race,
and worship a nameless God,
crouch, humble like grass,
a seraph on fire, we’d wash
each other’s feet, letting
the hamsin pass over,
and breaking bread without a claim.