Allenby Bridge
Tala Abu Rahmeh – United States

To Baba

To you sitting in the camp,
you dove head first into the fight
and I crossed home, tiptoeing
around your blood.

Beyond this dingy river, flies
grow thin and spread less noise,
or maybe we become
infested with love.

I would tell you that at home,
sky opens up to contain your breath
alongside your fiery spit,
but I’ll push it under the rug for gentler times.

Ramallah like every other city,
doesn’t house tents.
Here there are no temporaries,
our feet are planted amongst olive trees.

At the camp where children inherit
an unfinished story
the streets are too narrow
to hold even your shadow.

Ramallah’s children walk to school on the wheel steps
of April’s tanks, exchanging stories
of bombings and boasting
jailed uncles.

In the classroom, ancient
Arabic poetry curls to avert bullets
from the neighboring night.
The land that’s ours remains.

The blackboard
doesn’t dignify the checkpoint.

You.
Your face still scarred with loss repeat
the names till they grow heavy on your tongue,         
Yaffa, Haifa, `Akka, Falasteen

Abu Kbeer:
where your mother gave birth to oranges,
and your brother untangled the alphabets,
was stripped and raped and now lies still.

I don’t think about her every day.
When I stroll to the vegetable market,
I barely notice my own strawberries
dressed in Hebrew.

Ramallah: the city of chaos and bread,
houses my old winter clothes,
and a bed fitted with sheets waiting
for me to go back.

When I die: crushed with a missile or of heartache,
my body parts will rest between fresh daffodils,
and all the kind things I would have done will become prayers
in an overcrowded funeral.

When you die, tinged with sadness,
you will not be buried in your grandparents’ graveyard.
Their bodies were left out of a history cloaked
by an oblivious enemy.

But these days Baba as sorrow
builds itself brick by brick,
I don’t know who to feel sorrier for,
you or me.