1.

Home.

That is where the heart is.

So I hear.

 

The footprints of my people

Long lost on the winds of time.

 

Generations of men wasted 

Their beards growing out

To reach prophets

Abraham

Moses

Whose beards grew long for God’s

Chosen.

 

I am God’s chosen.

The people of the world know this.

 

Ink and words ran in rivers

While my people defend themselves

Pull, twisted, loosened, and tightened

 

Boundaries 

Lines

However invisible

Still need to be stretched 

 

I do not care about those invisible lines

 

As a child runs home 

To his father

When his knee is scraped and bleeding

From being pushed on the ground

So do I run home

To my father

 

Israel.

 

 

2.

Palestinian

In my family we have an unspoken tradition

We pass down hands

My hands were once my grandfather’s

The same hands that he used to rebuild

A home  for his wife and sons

Hands that have bled into soil 

That a far-off group of men

Said no longer belonged to him

 

Jew

I have spent many

An afternoon daydream

On this land

And what it would be like

To watch

The seed of my people

Sprout into a nation

They say this is not a place where

We belong

That our nation will never exist

So the Hezbollah send rockets

But his has been our home for centuries

 

Palestinian

We deserve to exist

Just as they deserve to exist

This is our land 

It is also their land

Politicians are full of the same hot air 

And ammunition 

As gunfire and rockets.

Jew.

Arab.

Those two words boil down to what?

Nothing.

We are the same

 

Jew

I wonder how long

This land can remain holy

When soaked in blood

For unrighteous reasons

Can we not simply share the land we live on?

We are blamed 

Ten of us die

They are blamed

Ten of them die

Is land worth this?

Is it worth nearly a century of bloodshed?

 

Palestinian

If I were in a different place

In a tee-shirt and jeans

And sat next to a Jew 

He would never know who I was

We would be unbothered 

By the other

 

Jew

If history mattered little 

And we judged a man by who he was

Not which nation he belonged to

I like to believe that

This fighting would dissipate

A man of any faith

Could live freely

 

3.

I wonder if my grandfather’s house still stands

Bulldozers have ravaged everything else

I have no way of knowing

Gaza is a world away from Jerusalem 

I do not care where the Jews go

Or how they get there

 

Really.

 

Why should I care how a thief meets his end

Or a murderer is punished

So long as he is punished

 

Those men oceans away from us

Perhaps if I took a bulldozer to their homes 

They could sit and be at peace with it

 

I do not understand how anyone could be at peace.

My soul is a restless, homeless, fire

That will burn through the arrogance

Of any Zionist

 

No man’s home can be seized peacefully.

 

No wall that can block my anger

No bullet can fire quickly enough from my gun

No body can contain my pain

 

 

So I fight

And will fight until I stand in the rubble 

Of my grandfather’s house

4.

This solves everything.

This solves nothing.

That argument within a council of nations 

Dressed to their best

Spoken in tongues  of little importantce

 

A country stolen from its people

Swept off their land

Like dust is swept off a floor

Into a dustpan

Gaza

 

Can it be so difficult?

It is a title to allow 

An identity 

A hope 

A blind man deserves this much

 

The Palestinians are not blind

 

This is the foothold needed

To allow them to hoist 

Their dangling bodies up from the edge of a cliff.

 

A long walk awaits them after this, 

perhaps it will no longer be the same futile walk

Of their parents or grandparents

 

Perhaps at the end of this walk

There is the light that they have searched for

Statehood