Poetry

I write a fair bit of poetry.  Thus far, I've tried to publish very little of it.  Here are a few pieces I've had published.

On Hearing Eman Ahmad Khammas Speak in Denver
(originally published in Messages from the Hidden Lake, Vol. II, 2010)

Greetings from the camps, my ancestors, yours
Greetings from smoke, the showers, the trains,
the planes, the ovens, the graves, and children
shot in cold blood yesterday. I left my children

my husband there, waiting for day, which
rises without a star, to plead our case
against your hearts. Listen, my relatives
for this you are: the whistle of the train

grows louder, here, in your desert plain.
Did you think it was confined
to mine? I do not come here to plead,
surrender six thousand years of dignity,

all that's left to me, but to gift you
a prophecy.  Hear me before it's too
late for your grandchildren.
The sun has gone down on mine,

but they will remember, as the trains
across this plain are emptied, filled again,
crows descend, and night screams across
the Atlantic:

In our hour of need we turned to you,
and you did nothing.



Afternoon at Deheisheh
(originally published on the Poets Against War website in 2001)

The old women still carry the keys, he says, to houses

in villages destroyed. Names on walls, these keys,

children’s memories of places they’ve never seen: This remains.

Here is a boy. There, a tortuous gesture of road.

Here the rivulets of sewage carve an artless dirt canyon.

Here is a promise, sparkling as the virgin 

century, youth center decked in 1940s memory: 

Zakharia, Deir Yassin,

village names climb the stairwell,  a vine from the past, 

leading up to a future that no one can see--

or nowhere--the future of refugees.

A young man from the camp guides us gently 

uphill. His confidence is that of a goat. 

He points out Hebrew markings: “The soldiers 

needed to find their way, so they named the streets.” 

Across the alley, different markers: black graffiti 

of soldiers, three times the size of a man, shooting 

small boys.

In the store, a gray man, wrinkled as newspaper burning

--he is, perhaps, 40--gives us bananas by the kilo, and refuses 

our shekels. Behind him, the wall is papered with dead men. 

Twenty-four faces, all under thirty, have--had--brown hair, brown 

skin, brown eyes as dark and deeply drunk as coffee: 

intense and sweet at weddings, bitter and black in mourning.

We amble through on-going lives: Blocks 

of cement, once tents, now home 

to entire clans. Mad angles groan

beneath quickly-built homes, awkward, 

unfinished as teenagers, forgotten boulders 

from some long ago earthquake.

Walking downhill, we are stoned, 

by a group of giggling seven-year olds. 

I greet them in their language. Then

I’m thrust a puppy, still blind and trembling,

yanked from a box of newborns, too young

to be away from their mother.

Delicately we step across Martyrs’ Alley, dodging 

the spurting blood and sniper’s fire of ghosts.

We return to the youth center, cultivating hope

like earth, and clean, closest to the street.

Here too, a memory: turnstile, the old 

and only way in, or out, now metal skin 

flapping, torn from ancient barricades, 

redundant, ridiculous, never used now, but 

by tourists who come to see 

how little peace has meant to the refugees.

Out of respect, for what we don’t know, those of us free

to come and go, walk through this bequest, one

at a time, as prescribed by a ghost, some ghost 

of our own, a voice in our heads, a promise 

unkept.

The Feast of San Cristobal
(published in Messages from the Hidden Lake, Vol II)

Numbed still from lunch margaritas, and late
to the markets where they kill birds on order
they pooled pesos for eggs, bread and cheese
forgetting the chicken demanded by

she of the hunger that may have saved thousands.
Moral magazine.  There is no defense, "Zapatistas
would never let a comrade go hungry." Stars
spin around grow faint. Across town

a half-drunk apostate kneels on the centuries 

old tiles imploring the tree 

of execution and faith
she stopped creeding several lovers 

and wars ago:

"I give you my life, again.  Take it.
Just tell me how to stop this pain."

Behind her a Tzeltal girl, shoeless,
shining a rock star's canvas, dirt-worn,
jungle-stained, wholly unshineable
shoes.