A woman lies with a man in the infirm light,
in a white cottage, the dunes or under an olive tree
somewhere in Tel Aviv or Haifa,
they're in Diaspora again. Nomad days beckon. Their days. Begin.
The soldier alive in the orange trees grows
mightier than a cedar in Lebanon
as the earth falls out of the sky
into the open market. Knee-deep in incised dust,
the man and the woman bellow, they bleat out
their stamina, squirming in heart rinds.
Trees stand like a death squad. Suicide
bombers driven to a pestilent field, hemmed in
by palms and oranges and by noon
the man and woman crawl in flaming mud
they can taste, scalding, slapping
their belly skin. The sound that smacks a corpse.
Now they're aware of an entity
who is themselves, who is their ancestors, emanation
of fated smoke. Their eyes, embedded like beetles
are opened in solidarity. Chosen.
They know of another emanation; solid and festering,
that sours sweat on laboring brows,
that poisons wine the bride offers her husband.
You know it's not about the land.
Out of these vermin vapors the woman with the man
must knit their breath through the dung and raise
their fleshy chrysanthemum fists to re-genesis.
In the flash of home-made bombs, puny volcanoes,
Israeli soil enters them from below, bleeds a smile,
will never be wholly lost.
They're left alone to tar-voiced war reports
counting babies and teenagers blown apart like dolls,
sputtering as they fall to the sea, voices
silenced against the steadily rising siren.
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