Our Wars: A poem for peace

 
 
          Our Wars
 
 

1.

When we were kids, we talked mostly about things
we didn’t understand. Not much has changed,
but we’ve exhausted. I remember
when the first of us was with a girl,
lost interest in the talk,
all of us cracked up and he just looking bored.

Our ignorance precedes us in our speech.
Incontestable, a blind and groping elephant.
Its footprints are explosives, crooked laws.

Let me suggest that bravery isn’t only for the brave.
It is civilian: it is muted in the panic.
Speak quietly, so we can hear the voice of one,
of few, and of the multitudes,
and know the difference.
 
 

2.

I do not want to write an American poem.
 
 

3.

In Beirut, the ash plumes bloom
like cyclamens pushing
through asphalt. A father smells for his child
in the debris, beneath these yellow flags
which pollinate the memories
of the young. How many fabric victories,
left uncounted in the roaring silence
of neighbors, of the ringing ears,
the lens that eyes us all in passing?
 
 

4.

In Haifa, the trains rear up
and whinny nightmares to the sea.
The sky is clouded with loudspeakers
and horns, and the louder clapping.
Grandfather tells me again:
things are hopeless, but not serious.

In basements, five sons hooded and hogtied
listen for the grindstone, for the sound
of envelopes jingling with coins. In the streets,
craters swamp with winter rain, bubbling from the deep.
In the yards, in cloisters and halls,
the small works, the stone walls
history is collected like pebbles on the sand,
while apparatchiks in one-thousand and one chambers
count the dead. They take lunch breaks, cigarettes,
point to maps. Things are serious, they say, not hopeless.

In basements, our kids play in waspish masks,
pass time counting summer thunder. Elbows joined,
we spin like roosters in our coops, we screw
the sky down, dig in heels. The kids plod
phalanxed through the fields, waiting for rain.

Hopeless. The figs and pomegranates drink only
from the hose. The sergeant plays backgammon
in a bleak room where someone is always
absent. We are all cleaning our guns.
 
 

5.

I am in Michigan.
(near the middle
of America, where the big
waters lie.)
Our voices reach across the cloudless
like a ricochet.
They stall, cannot inter
change. I can’t even get
a dial tone.

I am weighing, counting, shucking
dime-sized mussels from a lake.
I’m collecting numbers.

I’m collecting numbers and all I have
of you
are tolls and newsprint.
 

When it’s over,
                you will tell me all about it.
 
 

6.

In ’82, my father in Beirut, nearly married.
He found a chicken and cleaned it
completely, forgetting it was better
with the skin on, keeps the flesh from burning.

It was not his chicken but the men
were very hungry and
things were confused.
I’m sure you would have done the same—forget to leave
the skin on. Even the orders were forgettable, but
never confusing. Keep your feet and your gun clean.
 
 

7.

Through the electric fence there is nothing political
about him. He killed with his hands.
It was easy. I try to think of a way to be seen.
His eyes as dull as rubber bullets. The tender wires
keeping me. He would hold my head under a tire,
as if to press an olive in his teeth.

In his teeth he holds his hatred like a sea-anchor
in the humiliating heat, this firestorm of questions,
what good are anchors when you walk on water?

Old magician’s trick. He’s silent. No one conquers
just by magic. All men bow before the sword,
even Allah can’t resist the taste of blood.
Check the books. In gods and men,
the youngest are the hotheads and the hungry.

I am disinterested in his past. That’s our excuse.
This history is green, loose-packed
like a cigarette. Like the grass that has no season.
Needs no rain. This is not a game of chess without rules.

He is a coal train crawling, thinking he’s a deluge
and its ark. The same old          Old story—
Paradise and Burn.

Then again,
not every poem can be hopeful.

Then again, not every poem.
 
 

8.

Here is what you missed:

No rain last summer, just like always.
          No more citrus groves—the heavy water
finally flown in.
They burned tires
in Tel Aviv. I’m not sure if it was mutiny or purge.
          No more hustled pat-downs in the doorways
They’ve put girls in at the roadblocks now,
better eye contact and shibboleths for passing:
          how many nights I’ve played my tongue
          around that smoldering sabra fruit,
          practicing my chets and alephs.
Yom tov, they tend to say these days
before they wave you on,
relieved by the buffer of kilometers.

When I returned, I went to sea
to look for dolphins. They’ve left us.
Abandoned all the northern coast—
got tired of the bombs, I guess. Those sea men used
to plug ‘em with the rifles, till one day they quit
chewing through the nets,
and we stopped shooting.
 
 

9.

They’ll give me one more year until the draft.
One more exit visa, one more military escort to the hills
to comb for potsherds on the bunkered crests.
If I am dangling by my thread again, newsless,
the phones out and me with two good hands
beneath a mess of data, a mystifying surplus
of sweet water, I will not worry.
I have learned to put my faith in
the impenetrable statistics of war.
          One more time: your chances of survival.
          One more time. Things are hopeless but not perilous.
I promise I will not betray
our fear.

What would I do
if they handed me a rifle and a choice?
Those are the luxuries of foreigners.
 
 

10.

How sad to realize this poem
is written in the wrong language.
Slicha, Ana asif.

Forgive me,
I must go prepare for war.
 
 

11.     Expiration
(two weeks in Gaza)

The sky is cast in lead and drips her slags.
Like radios we amplify, replay
our failures from within. What year is it?
The year the sirens finally go hoarse, the wire reads.
Theirs is the only voice of reason,
everyone else says we are vampires, or should be.
What kind of sucking contest, Ouroboros of pain is this?

The tunnels swallow men and arms
and food and diapers and armed men.
The dead and near-dead trading places
in the wards, these ones are not our people, I rehearse
and the corner turns itself.
A bearded man is dragged out of the Knesset on his heels.
A smooth-cheeked man is wheeled
out front of Shifa hospital and shot along his hairline
which recedes. This repeats and
that repeats. He who does not collaborate
casts the first stone. He who collaborates, the last.
Come out from your father’s house, from your safe-room
and the place where witnesses were borne.
Come out from under your fallen house,
your hunger, come out from underneath our thumbs.

Today I won’t say anything and a hundred more will die.
David plays spades on the front line, waiting for rain.
He says he’ll have to blow some people up,
to go where tanks can’t fit.
He knows how far away he’ll be
when he returns. I’m farther now than when
I was across the world. Distance is measured
in ideas here, we’re all so close in blood.

David discharged a week ago, turned in his gun
and uniform, drank hard, started to sleep it off
and got the call. Back on the line. Your mother
understands. His hands shake and he has no rubber bands
to cinch his trouser cuffs. I call to relay
what they’re saying on the news
and to make sure he answers.
Last night I got a dial tone
and a bleeding on the line.
 
 

12.     All we ask for

The pilothouse of the Lilian
smells of sawdust and diesel,
wet paint, damp nets and mandarin.
On deck, the dawn flares and is snuffed
by a flak helmet of cloud. The Sea of Galilee
tremors light, mabsut like the black-eyed seamen
on their morning walk from bed to bottle.
We motor out and kick up cormorants.
The guys in sagging sweaters beg for radio,
demand coffee simmered over butane.
I’m watching green fog clear
in cobwebs, and the news arrives
to update all our worries—the gunman
begs to spare his family’s house, the boys still
dug in near Jabaliya, how many rockets fell
and greenhouses were damaged since the dusk,
and cash flow, and the forecast—
which comes down to me,

bobbing a fancy dipstick in this lake
that feeds a country running dry.
Fish for water, top up bottles,
calibrate. Trade curiosity for hope.
David, still AWOL since last night
when we went boozing and I told his hairy face
that part of every war was getting who you kill
all wrong. It’s not your fault;

So there he is, somewhere
between an order and another shot
of scotch, showered and trembling
and so happy to be home. And here I am,
still drunk and unconvinced
in rubber boots rainbowed by fuel,
knowing for him it will get lots worse
before any better, and the same is true
for this whole bloodied spit of coast.

God help us: please don’t give us all we ask for.
The Lilian’s wake curls like hot glass over a perfect calm.
 
 
                    7/2006 – 1/2009