After reading Ziad’s Gaza diaries
In your backyard, spring has
arrived early with robins and
cardinals singing pretty songs,
with squirrels and bunnies (not
children digging through rubble)
ransacking the earth for secret
treasures of seeds and nuts
still hiding in its chest.
Where you live, a trail opens up
to a panoptic forest, the path
leading to it your faith keeper
in the surety of seasons returning.
Yours is not the place where winter
overthrows autumn and never leaves.
Yours is a blue sky that sill puffs
up with tufts of cotton cloud, not
one so thick with bomb smoke
that children mistake it for an iron roof
that the angel of death roams nonstop.
You have no reason to rebel.
Where you live, department stores
sell clothes and libraries do their
lending thing. You don’t wake up
in a place where libraries start selling
pyjamas and underwear. Where a cat,
in her final days of pregnancy fights
to stay with you as you try to find her
a safer home. With peace as repugnantly
abundant as you possess, no gauze is
needed and you have no reason to rebel.
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