Arabic Room
The last month of your life you wanted to speak only Arabic in the afternoons so the kind lady who simmers pots of cabbage rolls came and sat heavily beside you and you told her your Palestinian father had come back to you for the first time in fifty years in his old cloak with his staff He told you firmly he was with you and your mother was too and you told the lady from Baghdad what your parents said as the hours rolled painfully forward and the four of you sat together on the bridge between worlds stretching back to countries that will never be the same Palestine Iraq but you felt calm on the bridge you told me later I have no fear
Hello, Palestine
In the hours after you died, all the pain went out of your face. Whole governments relaxed in your jaw line. How long had you been away from the place you loved best? Every minute was too much. Each year’s bundle of horror stories: more trees chopped, homes demolished, people gone crazy. You’d turn your face away from the screen. At the end you spoke to your own blood filtering through a machine: We’ll get there again, friend. When you died, your long frustration zipped its case closed. Everyone in a body is chosen for trouble and bliss. At least nothing got amputated, I said, and the nurses looked quizzical. Well, if only you had seen his country.
For Aziz,
Who Loved Jerusalem
A city trades prisoners, erects blockades, people bulldoze homes and cars, buses explode, back and forth, the army’s roaring tanks are never called terrorists. Three religions buried inside a city’s walls. Some kiss the walls. Some walk beside them, emptied of belief. My father dies with two languages tucked inside his head. Now we will never learn Arabic. For half a century we lived in mighty proximity to the resonant underpinnings, consonants and vowels. Now, a seven-pound box of ashes. After many months, we still have not scattered or buried them. They are not him, but I kiss the box.
