(Farasha means “butterfly” in Arabic) Tears pour as we Toss and turn Sleep is futile as They pillage and burn Complacency is useless We must rise for the oppressed Firstly in night prayers Begging for wrongs to be addressed Then we use any means At our disposal Boycott, divest, sanction Is our proposal Yearning to
Cease your fire For I am only a child who wishes to admire, Admire the waves as they crash on the shore, Admire the laughter, the music, the joy we had before I wish to chase kites, not run from the sound To see homes standing, not torn to the ground And to sit by
In bitter times stones cut your feet And the winds of change stood still. When all the voices and all the wars were scratched into your heart, And marked into your soul. I watched and waited for you. In the cruel and relentless call to arms The mothers and the children hid Crouched and beaten
I sit at my machine, the early morning news still ringing in my ears. An earnest voice acknowledges the land our fathers took. Now some attempts are made at reparations and apologies. That’s good, I think, long overdue. Then images of war, of starving children, a wasteland, fills the screen. I hear the cries of
Where do the doves go when the bombs fall? Into the grit and grey of skies And swift to the mountains and the valley of tears. Where do the mothers and children hide When the screech of sirens burn bitter the night And nowhere now, not a single light of hope illuminates the Gaza sky.
When my father was seventy-four and I was no longer a girl that cowered, skirting the edge of the room, I asked him to travel back to his childhood, the landscape he’d banished for years. He became an Amish boy in suspenders, hitching the horse to the buggy, driving Delaware’s back country roads past the
Some women resist ruin for three thousand years. The wrecking ball smashes the front closet and hall but they just keep humming and dusting the knick-knacks. Lot’s wife disobeyed, turned and looked back at what was forbidden, now she’s afraid to risk any tears, four could dissolve a salt pillar. I watched a woman sell
I cast my bread on the waters, what I’d wanted and loved shuffled off on a raft, waved, promised to call then never looked back. Sometimes grief braids a rope, crafts a cage or a prison. I set the last brick, found a noose coiled round my neck. What could I do but build a
He conjured up a crow and sent it like a curse, cloaked in black, raven-lit, it settled on her shoulder. Who could have guessed a crow could save, it stole the poisoned bread. Now when ravens strut she counts their raucous throats as gifts that forced a turn, her winter heart borrows light, just like
Like Father’s unfinished life, the half-dressed donated stone stands in the farm’s front yard true as an oak. A traveling mason settles for pasta and peas at the family cemetery. The youngest daughter whispers Father’s name in his hairy ear like a sad girlhood secret, her tears pooling like stars in his chip-pitted cheek. Later,
