Category: Poem

A View from Tel Aviv

Maybe if all the plants of the world
withered and died for a day
we might understand.

If no music played
If no one smiled
for a day
we might approach their personal,
family, collective pain.

If the sun didn’t come out
and the sky hid its blue
we could know.

When an open air prison
ended up being the best of times.

Watching the sea wave back on itself
Watching the waves of concrete
collapse in on themselves.

I don’t want to know.
I can’t not know.

The weather in Tel Aviv is too perfect at this time of year
to bear witness to such inhumanity.

When things can feel so light and breezy
just up the coast
an attack helicopter ride away.

Have you heard about the 72 members of a family killed? Or the 41? Or the reporter’s family while he was at work?

Kids with no parents
Parents with no kids
People with no nothing.

Painnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

That I can never conceive

Trauma as the essence of being.

Imagine.

I hope you have. Because we must. Because we live while they die.

Wartime Saturday in Jaffa

I don’t want to be insensitive

By doing normal things in abnormal times

and maybe sharing it.

By showing or not showing faces on missing person posters in an otherwise quiet vacant coiled-up Tel Aviv.

By watching or not watching Gazan children quivering, covered in blood, dust and tears.

By comparing traumas. By supporting new ones.

You who survived the Holocaust.

You who lived through the Nakba.

You who tried to reconcile the two.

You who will not be forced off your Land.

You whose God has justified your cause.

You who understand your Peace and maybe not theirs.

I don’t want to be insensitive to any of you and any of it,

but I still want to be human and alive

in body and spirit

and allow the pain to be as real as it is

so that maybe one day

we can all heal

together or apart,

But For Good.

May all the Gods and Prayers come together for the Holy Land to live up to its name

In A Taxi From Larnaca, 15 years later

The Holy Land,

full of holes:

fences, walls, gates,

sects, sanctions.

Wholly unholy

it often appears,

and then

disappears.

Except for the lives

and deaths

alive in those holes

and walls and their

warring gods.

Unsure of anything

except their side,

their trauma,

aggression,

oppression –

Sanctity.

Casina Solatia

I want to write poems in bright inner courtyards. Sitting somewhat uncomfortably at corner tables.

Quietly, pensively, naturally.

Inner courtyards that aren’t at all obvious from the outside. Charming, private and full of possibility.

Like in Spain, or Puglia in the south of Italy. Or even in Morocco where I imagine they exist even though I’ve never been.

Courtyards of old farmhouses, or petty noble castles, or reconstructed villas.

Made up of weathered stones and chipped ceramic pots. Uneven walls and careening vines. Steps up to roofs that are never visited.

And maybe I slowly smoke a cigar dipped in chocolate or cognac. Refill my coffee cup three, four, five times.

Forget what day of the week it is and maybe even what month. Hear the wind passing overhead. Whispers of birdsong, gravel roads, wildflower bushes.

Dream of other worlds and other times and other lives. Lived in and around such inner courtyards.

Of all the possible poems born on unhurried inner courtyard mornings or fading on every cool, orange grey violet sunset.

Little worlds in the bigger one. Perfect moments. Personal paradises.

Sudanese Homecoming Discovery

I feel far away

Far away from Rome

Far away from Ukraine

Far away from home.

Exotic

Erratic

Ecstatic.

The home my wife left a lifetime ago

Has somehow welcomed me

Unexpectedly

Perfectly politely

Properly indifferently.

The sounds, food, heat

Of an entirely different world

Connected to me intimately

Ritually, vaguely, lovingly.

Has allowed me to understand something

maybe for the first time

about my father in law

for real.

About belonging

About longing

About his 12 brothers and sisters

Here and there then and now

About personal histories

Mental mythologies.

About the suitcases

Of vitamins and spices

Foul and cream soda

Memories and hopes.

Suna, Salwa, Rauf.

Joseph, Lilia, Diana.

Peter, Daniel, Dalia.

Aleksander.

Plastic chair sidewalks and kerkade

Early starts and cool nights

Polished tuk tuks with nowhere to go.

Khartoum

Khart-houm

Hart-hom

Heart-home.

Very Nice.