IF I WERR A PALESTINIAN POET if were a Palestinian poet living in hell part of the year ad in paradise some of the time I’d write of butterflies in the garden and fireflies at night I feel the weight of a bulldozer breaking over dawn ancestral fields lost in the vortex hatred spilling out of a cup to despoil our vines I hear the sting of a wasp on the backs of my elders I walk at midnight to see most clearly those women walking to the market the Sumerian heat deep in our blood and wrestle with all the people who live in my body, all the temples lining the route to silence I balance life with bewildering blankets of star light my eyes imagining the dead weight of time and of the timeless I walk through the Song of Songs, I find my way to the bread maker’s house and cherish the wheel of words and knead the nouns into life you may hold and devour I call the dove to my door, I cry for the end of my exile, I curse the invader yet invite him to my room If I were a Palestinian poet sitting in a café on the Left Bank drinking a double espresso my eyes closed, half remembering the secrets of a cold wadi and the walls of death I’d stare at the sun and write of your eyes or I’d never left the prison fate has handed over to me and I look as others love the land I was born to embrace oh I’m looking at the breeze and Jerusalem’s pale pink walls built by Suleiman and go down to the absence down to the dead child down to the grief down to labyrinth of dreams and over to hopefulness down to explaining the moon touching a monolithic rock, a blade of grass on the field, an ear of corn in a market basket. . . butterfly, so soon, so quick, lithe fragile engineer of miraculous design I wear you on my head and in the desert mind, and walk in a garden’s jasmine mine I’m just here in my room on a hillside in San Francisco no one ever came to bulldoze my house or take my land or tell me how to think or cage me in or wall me out or work round the clock to make me invisible soon may those clouds cover the wings of a butterfly, over the evening breeze out of the Crescent over the sails, one word, one heart out of the fugitive storm
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 21:41:28 +0000
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