Poems of Palestine
Your fingers dig deep
Into my cold… broken hand.
How sweet is the warmth
That you, this way, command.
Go on and move
My blood around,
Go on, read my bones…
They can’t pretend.
Tie my tongue in knots.
Make heavy my letters.
Leave me with my thoughts,
Stumbling and fettered.
If I can just find
That pocket in your eyes
Where I can rest.
Oh memory,
How beautiful is the smile
Of time’s innocence?
Oh to hold that hand
That nurtured generations…
How does one return
The miracle of life?
When a prayer is burning
With the fires of memory,
My soul is lost
On the milky banks
Of afterlife’s river.
My hands are searching in the virgin mountain
Of our being.
Yet I breath,
A wind that has
Already forgotten,
And yet I breath
In a world that
Will not remember.
We will walk
Where the sun drips like honey,
Just past,
The horizon.
How, in only our eyes
I see the birth
Of every moment.
What do we say
When we look away?
Will we yet be
As the dust in summer?
Childish,
In the roots,
Of an olive tree.
You are a temple for lost souls,
Who seek not scripture but rest.
For your doors are never closed
And spring runs childishly about.
And when the harsh winds of winter
Come bellowing from the North,
They are tempered in their shame,
Settling in their youth, beneath your eyes.
Life will not find your secret,
As she is blind to her self.
Though time will remember your refuge,
And forever find you, his rest.
Have I found my self in a child’s breath,
Lost amongst the olives branches and figs,
Or in the language of blossoms themselves
Mourning in her basket at dawn?
“Take me back, take me back” I call to her,
“I still do not know from where I came.”
The illusion of our choice is called away
In the broken road to the market;
Cobbled musings, dreams of an old mans coffee,
Sown by the roadside seamstresses of our past.
“Who are they, do they not see you?”
Her basket sways innocently forgotten.
And in the shouts of Ramallah’s market,
The mourning of the day is cultivated.
I am left to a stranger by her hands,
An in those hands I remember being taken away.
Between the borders of my self,
The lips of the departed mourn,
For there my spirit descends,
Taking the eyes of death.
You have walked upon our land
Through your many journeys,
Though the same face
You have never shown her.
In her restlesness she flourishes
Through her faith she falls…
Despite your changing tears that settle
She knows that you are the same.
You have passed our land
In unending pilgrimage,
Yet you have never shown
Her the same face.
She has thought of Us
When We had not of her
As a widow that sings
To her unborn child.
And her restless faith is,
Though parfum of the heart,
Rising after rains that tell
Her you are the same stranger.
I heard a song as faint as
The tide’s prayer,
’twas the voice of mountains
Where my soul was born.
“It is where my child waits,
Drinking the aniseed tears
Of Ishtar’s womb,
I want him to wait more.”
Buried within her eyes
Was the same ode to the gone…
So I learn in my reflections
That break, abandoned, by her shore.
Our earth awakes to a call.
From within itself a voice
Speaks lightly the amber truth.
She pulls across her body
The sunlight shawl of morning,
Across amber fields of wheat
She lifts the dew of dreams.
Two golden seas mix, this instance,
And truths blend,indifferent;
For what is taken… is lifted.
Let the leaves of the olive tree,
Soon heavy with dreamlessness,
Let me hear this silence be
This prayer she listens to.
With the Adhan comes our past,
Wind that makes groves chatter,
And her prayers unheard
ahorsealone 
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