Tag: Palestine

An Old Friend

ahorsealone

We wrestled beneath the tomato vines,
Our elbows and knees beneath a broken cage,
Finding each other when no one was looking…
With dirt in our hair, and smiles in our eyes.

I listened in the garden until dark.
Prayers passed,
And the billows of sage rose from
The kettles in town.

What words were you forced to leave with?

جدتي

ahorsealone

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.

Doorless Key

ahorsealone

These letters are want the days
That I’ll remember few,
When we galloped fields of sage
And valleys of featherfew.

There you hummed a poets lines,
When of sage rose grape vines;
And threaded the night a gown
With lamp lights that littered town.

I couldn’t as a stranger pass
As you dressed a virgin land,
A language braided of the past
With a homeless heart and handless hand.

So  your hills I braved
When you unearthed to me,
As we with night behaved,
Where you conceived a doorless key.

 

 

 

To my sister

ahorsealone

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.

 

A Mourning Harvest

ahorsealone

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.