Two Poems

Hope

It's hopeless, you told me,waking in the middle of the night—the moonlight driftingin through the curtain—and you looked at your wife,at her thin, whitening shouldersand dark hairas she was slowly breathing,thinking again and againof all this evil,the loss amassed in the soured heartday after day, for two years and more.It was in Karmei Avdat.I rose, you said,and without my glasseswent out barefoot onto the gravelto a bench we'd movedagainst the shedand sat there in my underwear,staring out toward the side of the hill.Along that slope, I told you,five million stones have been cast:the stones will always be stones,no good will ever comeof them or to them—not in another two years,and not in a hundred.But if you shift your eyeseven a meter to the side,you'll see a plantwith five tomatoes.That's where you should look.These vile people will acquireplane after planeand bomb after bomb,and more will be wounded and killed,more be uprooted and ruined;for this is all they're capable of,and not tomorrow, and not forever,will any good comeof them or to them,for evil holds no promiseand possesses neither the life nor yieldcontained in a single tomato.When I think of this land,love flows through my heart.When I think of Amira and Neta,and Rachel in her orange parka—and not of the pus of the cruelor their barking,and their boom boom boom—but this substance,this certain serumthat's secreted in meand throughout the world gives riseto building, repair, and enlightenment,counsel and cooperation,this is the hopethat lends me a place and groundin which to send out a bold rootthere, beyond that heap of stonesat the Mas'ha checkpoint,at the store run by the old grocerwith the white crocheted-capwho stands by the doorwith plates of labnehwhich he takes out of the rickety fridge;and this is the longing and yearningto go down into the village grovesand through the breach in the barbed-wire fence,to cross the ditch—turning my backto the land-grabbers' contractorwho, with his guards,peers out from the jeepat the burrowing bulldozer—and like someone in Florence climbing to the topof Brunelleschi's Dome,to mount that hilland under the tree beside the tent,to sit with Nazeeh and Riziq,to look into Nazeeh's faceat his toenails and black sandal,to see Riziq's cigarette—this is hope—and with Riziq and Nazeehto look out far beyond the fence,beyond the barbarity,toward the border of humanity.

Lotem Abdel Shafi

The heart dies without space for love, without a moral horizon:think of it then as a bird trapped in a box.My heart goes out with love to those beyond the fence;only toward them can one really advance, that is, make progress.Without them I feel I'm half a person.Romeo was born a Montague, and Juliet came from the Capulet line,and I'm a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion—therefore I'll be delighted if my daughter marries the grandson of Haidar Abdel Shafi.I mean this, of course, as a parable only—but the parable is my measure,and since it has more to do with my body than teeth or hair,this isn't just some idle fancy that, out of poetic license,I place our fate in my daughter's sex.That I grant myself this imaginary gift, testifies to the extentto which we're living, still, in the underworld,where we're granted the hope and potential of an amoeba.But all mythology begins with creatures that creep and crawl,spring out of the ground and devour each other,until a sacred union occurs, healing the breach in the world.The Arab groom from Gaza...