The Investment

Through the sisyphean farce called life

He gently walked up

Crossing through the dust and rubble

A peony budding in the late summer

Suddenly life

Became a series of carnivals, glitter, and rainbows

Books, philosophy, and intellect

Children’s games, sunny days at the park, and candy

I recalled lazy afternoons in Paris

Her voice on the other side

Luring me to join her

¡But I had made an investment!

I recalled

¡I needed to see a pay off!

I wondered long after the peony was gone

Would I have been one, too?

Would we have been crossing through
The same rubble and dust

Two budding peonies

In the late summer?

Sylbo

Today I watched a video about Sylbo, one of the world's oldest communication methods, a language created with whistling sounds, spoken among a small group of natives of the Canary Islands. I couldn't help but remember the whistling of young men during the first intifada in Nablus, a town in the Northern part of the West Bank, Palestine. They would communicate in the most intricate ways between windows during curfews and to send messages about approaching Israel army jeeps. I remember it was called the "Language of the Birds", another form was spoken between those who wanted to obscure their words by adding Sh- and -Z in between different letters.
I no longer see birds in Palestine.
I no longer hear the whistling, either.

Penknife

Yesterday,

a young man 

left his farewell letter

asked his brother 

to console his mother

and took his last selfie.

An hour later
he was gunned down

with bullets from the enemy

for carrying out a stabbing attack

with a penknife

then he was left to bleed

as they stood shaking, twenty feet 

away from his withered body.

Today, the street was cleared

for the entourage of the leader

of the country he thought

he was fighting for 

they rode armored vehicles

The wheels of which 

crushed over 

the young man's spirit

The Tender Heart of Goliath

Wandering in nature
under the cold rain
With only a thin shirt on his back
He knew the local names
of every miniature plant

he pointed out: "That's medicine"
"That's poison"
His nose was pink
and his laughter was defiant
"We are tough, Habibi!"

And yes, I was sure that
we are the mountains
and the caves we once inhabited
The ruins of palaces we once built
The cities we conquered
The blood of empires
we toppled

We are the world, at a glance
And yes, we are a made-up nation
A nation made up of a thousand other nations
that is hard to trace how it came
into existence

But no, we are not a false nation
We are both Goliath and David in unison
The effete heart in face of beauty
We are the Ancient Peoples of the Sea,
The lost tribe in the desert,

We are the Hebrew alphabets
Which were confiscated from us
the Palestinian Aramaic we once spoke,
The distinct Levantine dialect we currently use,

We are the entire history
of "Gentiles and Jews",
the one we are told is no longer ours
We are the undamaged population of Jesus
The fresh waters of the Jordan,
We were his disciples
and his accomplices in treason

We are a solitary olive tree we call "Roman"
yet we are not sure when we planted it
We are the carob-colored hair,
the red beard,
the sun-kissed skin

We are the Romans who roamed the same streets
since the dawn of inscribed history
We are the Philistine language we misplaced
the Hebrew language- that no one speaks
Yet fondly listen to its beats

We use the same old slingshot
and the small rock
that has probably been used
for the same purpose
(to shoot)
Since the time we cursed ourselves
in our own bible

The whistles we still communicate by
and call it "the language of the birds"
We are the "Arabs" who came in
thirsty and tired,
who thought our
Jerusalem apples
were a piece of heaven,
and we thought their heaven
was the one we have preached about forever

We are an ancient lone Greek monastery
A Muslim allegiance
A communist intellectual we expropriated
from our homes

A sycamore fig tree we brought back from Egypt
A cumin seed that flavors our meals
The tender hand of a street-vender
A Canaanite deity we never met
Yet still, we call our villages by its name

A fig tree we planted
ten thousand years ago
but we ended up uprooting it when
It desecrated the sanctity of the sun
Over our limestone-paved porch
With its leafy branches

It tumbled like a giant,
But Goliath never fell

A relief from an ancient Egyptian temple showing two captive Philistine warriors with their distinct head-piece or hair-do.