RED CARPET

Homecoming wears a new colour every time.

It's my second morning home. 

A tree, red with flowers, leafless, teases me.

When I step into the park, a redder floor maps 

my unsure landing.

Waxy petals of semal curl out with a brazen 

assuredness that crows on the tree echo. 

The red flower bed arrests movement. 

Knowing its tenure is short lived, 

spring turns into a compulsive host. 

I’ve looked at this park for forty years.

Yet this crimson canopy appears new. 

The eye is a known trickster.

This isn't the red-carpet welcome I'd expected.

On the television, I watch spring in the West Bank.

It’s unmistakably red, like mine. 

A river, scarlet, warm, always fresh, smelling of iron, 

bursts off the skins of unfed dogs, day-old babies, 

mothers in wait. 

This red is an unnatural disease, an excess

brought on by airstrikes that fall off the sky 

like berserk confetti.

In his smelly clothes, a young man stands before

his parents' corpses and bawls his lungs out. 

For more than forty years, his mother had looked 

at this land, its watermelon tears, its bitter-lemon sweat, 

its devastating holiness. 

Here, homecoming has forever been 

this single hungry amaranthine shade.  

Looking at the young man through 

the odourless safety of the TV screen, 

I wonder if this was the red-carpet 

he'd expected his parents to congeal into.