Well past fifty, I shed my
first tear
for an Arab. Sulaiman Khatib
was not looking for tears.
I do not know where
he was looking. My mirror says
it was not my face, not my dress
nor sweater. It was not my hands
nor the way I sat, listening. Two days
have passed. He says he saw my words.
His eyes are finer than mine. I cannot see
my words. I am looking.
To the Promised Land—Aliyah?
Yes and no. To Israel, to Palestine.
Bring an extra suitcase for your words,
he said. But beware and rejoice—
they may or may not pass the checkpoints,
pass customs. The wounded who sit
with the loneliness of a wall can see your words.
They will feel a duty to take them.
~
Anita of Brooklyn heard
the call—Aliyah!
She speaks of celery, how it grew in empty soil,
in the bloc of Gush Katif. She speaks of how
things were, the glass houses of peppers, eggplant,
and herbs of every kind, of her dunams, two acres.
She speaks of Aviel, her son, of his gift to Rabin—
tomatoes, their first, when he was three, she sighs
and remembers the leaving. She speaks of emunah,
of faith in seeds. She speaks of one last crop.
Maha of Libya listens.
Remembers. She carries
through life the words of her mother, her father,
who were cast from their Ramle home.
She hears their words as
moans.
They are hers—no less than brown eyes,
a long neck. When she was a child, their words
fell like wet stones from the sky. She hid
from the weight of their falling. When the skies
cleared with silence, she would gather the stones
where they lay scattered, carry them in her pocket,
raise one to the light. Study every side, as if a prism,
cry her parents’ tears.
With the years, the stones
became many.
Her mother would slip like a leaf from its branch
into the shadows: A Jew, she would sigh,
lives in our home.
Light, as it will, breaks
through a cloud
to a stage of two—a cedar and a crow,
a thistle and a toad.
Anita of Gush Katif
speaks.
Maha listens through the bones of her mother
and for a moment is not her mother. She says,
How sad to be forced from your home.
Anita cocks her head,
looks long
into dark eyes. A stone falls from her pocket.
Maha picks up the stone,
turns it in the light.
~
The tide of fealty ebbs
from where you stand before us,
a white square called a
ghutra
on your head, a black cord holding it
in place. We wait in a quiet ripple
around you. Your head tilts slightly,
as if listening.
On the wall, in a black
and white
kaffiyeh, a face
as familiar as any
on an American dollar—
Abu Ammar, father of Ammar.
We called him simply Arafat,
gone this day two years.
You speak of ties to Hamas.
Your words, like the moon, rile the seas.
You speak of a drop of
water, you say,
it can dent the hardest of things.
You speak of the eyes of
your son,
how the soldiers as clouds slipped in
with the night to arrest you. You speak
of what is good, what is right, for your people,
you—Abu, you, the mayor of Beit Ommar.
You say you cried,
though you are man, cried for your son
that he learn of hate, learn of hard.
You know how the wound of
man
is passed down to his sons, to his people.
The man who can fold metes out no wounds.
I say you are rock, you
are stone,
you are water. You say you are the moon.
I see how your moon can
calm the seas.
I call you Abu in the art of seeing.
I call you poet.
What do I do with this man
of Hamas
who is pleased, who smiles?