In memory of Refaat Alareer and Hind Rajab

I’ll be brief, friends, speak quickly, this much

I’ve learned: there’s no perfection

in plague years, the soul of wit’s an engine

of breath, a puff of smoke, a pinch of salt,

a string, a tale, a life

in American dreams, war’s a fortress, a bunker,

a freckled whelp, a celluloid film, a stupid girl

forever picking the daisy that starts the

silo rising like a sphinx, sirens blaring

the way they did the year I turned six,

the year I learned to carry my own

lunch, to crouch before teachers,

crowd other children in a stairwell

studying fallout signs

 

it’s been one long sleep since – decades,

years now even since the summer the sky turned

smokey orange, the tornado tore its way

across town, needling and funneling broken

glass and fury, ‘til it pointed its crooked

finger at the house next door,

huge catalpas lurching and buckling, blown

like a stack, across the roof, across each other,

the world’s a shaken 8-ball

U.S.-Israeli-made death delivered by day

and by night, by flood, and by famine, by fire

bombs on babies, by brains on walls,

by bodies knuckled under rubble, under

checkpoints and bombs, drones clicking like

locusts, butts of rifles, smiling soldiers taking

selfies in ruins

children in camps, children in smokestacks,

bodies in bags, in shrouds, white sheets a miracle

scrubbed clean by women weeping, bodies broken

giving birth, giving full plates and empty, giving

love among the ruins, mother of

God in Reverse, wind it all back–

until buildings rise and body parts fly

back into people, until the dead

wake up singing

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