What We Were Taught / What We Have Lost
One of us will never suffer, you promised
as if words were as simple as offering a car ride
for pistachio ice cream on Sunday afternoon.
As easy as turning on the evening news
to hear the fractured screams of a father—
his child killed by mortar fire.
You promised I would be loved in the way
only a father can say, like a spell uttered three times
in the garden with trellises of jasmine flower.
Dad, today I need miracle ice cream
for the boys on the beach in Gaza,
a soccer ball between them.
Their lifeless bodies haunt me
and more, the young faces of their friends.
You promised I would never suffer, father,
but imagine the families checking websites
for their loved ones, for the innocent dead, targeted
by the country we were taught to believe in.
Sometimes I still look for my friends Amjad and Samir,
boys who drove me to Gaza’s shoreline decades ago,
dreaming of five star hotels, an airport.
Father, the day you were diagnosed in Boston, I dressed slowly
and then climbed back into bed, a green blanket
over my head as the bus exhaust rose up,
as the restaurant workers next door
picked stones from grains of rice,
speaking in a language as foreign to me as the future.
Now death arrives each night over Twitter—
the bluebird of death you might say.
And I think of your promise. Your face.
~for Ahed Atef Bakr, Ishmail Mohamed Bakr, Mohamed Ramez Bakr, Zakaria Ahed Bakr and Abraham Rich
In Other Words Bookstore, I Imagine
the lives of the Women of the Word
and What We Leave Behind.
Secondhand volumes lined-up together
debate late into night’s Mourning Hour.
On a side table, My Hope for Peace,
signed by Jehan Sadat and the Middle East
enters this quickly fading bookshop
accompanied by a phantom Lemon Tree.
Out-of-print mothers and daughters join in
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glimpse Naomi’s, Words Under the Words.
Some texts are made for each other—
Travelling Rooms and After the Last Sky.
There’s a developing interest in Water Logic
and the bestseller, What We Have Lost.
If I were to walk again through my life,
Down Roads That Do Not Depart
keep Half of a Yellow Sun in my shirtsleeves,
would My Happiness Bear No Relation to Happiness?
I lift Tomorrow’s Tomorrow from the upper shelf:
Dear Memory Board, Dear Everyone’s Pretty
and Nine Parts Desire, dear Musical Elaborations—
Open the Cloud Box. Taste the Olives,
Lemons and Zaa’tar; The Space Between Footsteps.
Redress The Butterfly’s Burden, the Unreal and the Real—
The Question of Palestine.
Checkpoint
Gaza City, Gaza
I arrive via optimism, in the aftermath of Oslo,
into a roomful of bright teachers,
Welcome to my class on human rights theater,
for Palestinians who have known only its absence.
There are concerns, and then, much excitement,
over the abolishment of classroom rows.
No more first or last students; an equal footing.
On our last day together, a few students ask for my passport—
the men look terribly serious with long rifles
slung over their shoulders. In reality—
these are water guns borrowed from a teacher’s son.
Our play is called, Checkpoint, they tell me.
Each day we live this way.