"You weren't born here"
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Occupation
For Wail Sadiq
There is always war
in the country you thank me for calling Palestine.
You weren't born here
but recall the terraces of olives and almonds. Even frozen
they are a kind of curfew that delivers the land
to you one razed village after another, one
citrus grove or valley to remember
in your sleep that makes the rounds
of all the hours, and because this is
not my story and you could have never been
without this story, I look down
upon you, secretly, in my own sleep, and smell the whip
unleashed on your people, their graves cleansed,
the floating ruins gone to settlements.
Tell me how to recognize the chains,
the arguments between a young man and his terrain,
and I promise not to buy the natural crown of thorns
clustered and wrapped in tissue.
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