Berry Fields of Gaza
In the berry fields of Gaza, fruit
awaits the picking, you can pluck
the ripest bending down, a blue sky
blurs, upon your back
a kiss of sun on neck and arms
just pluck the ripest, watching crops
fattening in the blaze
make a living for the children
telling stories of the stones
first laid, songs first sung.
In the berry fields of Gaza
it is a life within a crevice
yet bountiful and soul-filled,
blessed when granted rain, a kiss
on ground as gaunt the toothless
man, lost not done translating.
The land may yield its fruit
a toast to health, to old age
as in the Prophet’s words
if farmers are but constant
persisting in a life between
the stone and storm.
“Why are you
collecting this my mother?”
In the berry fields of Gaza
with older bones than Carthage
surely wealth to reinvent itself
dangling dreams
temptation like the golden calf
feathers dripping from a rebirth
plumage from the flame
myth a fever, myth on fire.
Why else would they stay in this
tread upon poor motherland
generations wounded each in kind
taking sour words for nightly
purgatives to dream by
praying at the sliding dusk
for resurrection in the morning
night being much more empty
hours then before the light
has left, then how else would
they in this bitter salt and ash?
“Why are you collecting meat
my mother?” a girl of six is asking.
She stands before the tree, one hand
a claw in pain she’s pulling clouds
down covering her tragedy
her other wiping tears
covering a croaking voice
“His hand lay over there.”
In the scudding clouds
a sky full, wide-angle
spread above her
her guardian in a nun’s garb
made stout by thirty
on a peasant diet, starchly lived
a life of dice she’s shelled by tanks
missed–a gout of nightmare
either way by forty, she is
staring past the camera frame
she looks away, this witness
accompanying the news the fields
nowhere in sight
a building in the upper right
a leaning pole and two more
winter Gaza passersby
thirty meters off they watch
the scene as extras and
triangulate the photo
New York Times’s translation
of her broken word confession
shanty in the photo’s background
third world special by accretion
from stones worked first
in undocumented times
by unmarked laborers, wayside
by an intersection, palm tree
sole flailing wave of green above
the corrugated metal hammered
to a masonry carapace, the leaning
power pole standing from inertia,
one line strung
a garroting familiar to the age
and all the time between
has been as slow decay.
“His other over there!”
Near the berry fields of Gaza
an unmarked widening
where the lanes collide
shepherds and sweet children mix
a donkey cart, combustion
engine hulk on rusting frame
just minutes earlier lurching
on balding tires, cornering the turn
AK-47’s proud antennae, spray
black exhaust a meal of choice
for smooth skin baby Vandals
the local infestation who had never
known from whence they came nor
beyond the present fork.
with boarding cards for heaven!
her scream was heard by no one.
A child arriving
at her first blood, age of veils
she’s seen, Lord what she’s seen
brothers and her uncles
grim pride strapping dynamite
like armor to their caved in chests
“Why are you collecting this
this meat, oh my mother?”
In the berry fields of Gaza
sometime before the crowing cock,
first prayer, before the tank shells
launch near silence in the dark
when their cries are heard again
an angel from the Lord, else Abraham
his patriarch should come again
deliver from this hell of tribes
one soul-wrenched mother, she
a child herself one time
dreaming of the berry fields.
For Hani, 17; Basam, 14; Mahmoud, 13; Rajeh, 12