Stranger, warmth returned to the pink of your palm, slide your fingers over my lips, a sealed love letter in a bottle.
Secrets are really just in search of an ear to crawl home. The flower to your hearts darling bud that opens up like a novel.
We douse our faces with ash, a sacred rite of benevolent smear we dab behind our ears. The wind blows it gone. I can’t help but wonder, is this how love ends?
In my cab, I watched your fingers lick the mist-covered window as a caligrapher’s pen drawing escape plans to Mecca. My eyes so full of question.
I drove you past the lamp posts and trees that lean with life each nest a child strapped to a mother’s back. The birds singing to lull their young.
They have seen too much.Every building sitting grandiose on its footprint, harbouring secrets only the walls can whisper.
You no longer need to hide the scars, Palestine, Gaza sits as a wound across the strip of flesh between your breasts
You veil in your hijab.
We burn some rain on your tongue. Your mouth a mosaic cut of glass, a goblet to catch sunshine as a pail atop
your head that empties when we kiss.
You said out loud enough to browbeat the neighbours, “This is not Islam”. But I took you in my arms anyways.
We cannot argue with grace. When God sobs, there is nothing imperfect in the way you claw at your thighs to draw blood.
The sand clings to my eyes-blind- I see not. My ears stopped, to harvest sound. We disperse as dust. The streets split. Gasoline spilt on the tarred path,
We rush to drink the tarnished milk as blood we sop with bread. There is no promise of communion here, Egypt we are dying, Egypt, we are dying
O Alexandria!
By badawi caravan we have seen the tumble weed tussling the arid savannah at dark and know how it feels to be forgotten.
What a strange and yet common song?
I call your name in tongues the darkness swallows whole. I am just a broken throat. I know you have heard this old song before when we
watched the stars scratch light unto a blackboard and felt foolish…
When was the last time we put aside our differences and scuffled for the moon. Upon pulse of morning
You wait for the first kiss of dawn as a
chaste leaf. The sun has always been your lover.
Become sand with me. Infinte and elsewhere. My tears, only, atoms over Hiroshima I smear on your skin as an ocean washes the feet of shore.
I am yours to slave-labour- pick the crop, tilt the sand and bear children in the gross. Salt the sweat that breaks from my spine and serve it over pounded yam.
We will dine in silence. My blood but sap to feed the future, nestled in your womb. Judea will need sons. Seeds to lead us
Unto the grain, again where we will meet at the feet of Galilee, walk the Jordan and this time choose to drown without a fight.
Today’s news costs money; tomorrow it will be free.
