FOR THE PEOPLE OF GAZA

Only winter has got this stubble field

Far off between stunned oaks, a triangle

Of ravished ground, that has no choice

But to accept the sky’s insanity.

Why have the sentry oaks stopped watching

And sucked up sleep from such depths

As the blind stones can only dream about?

Peace has not been declared in the slightest,

The bitter air is briefly exhausted,

But that is all, the field is a corpse

But that will not stop the sky smashing it.

The oaks say only this: we are standing,

We are not standing, we have stopped standing

But we are still standing, look, we are still standing.

A friend saw in vision a cloud of murdered souls over Palestine. This poem responds to that, though the vision was not mine.

CLOUD OVER PALESTINE

Where shall we go, where shall we go?

Even the gates of heaven are closed

Till this great matter is resolved.

Above the land six million souls

In a great cloud blot out the light.

You to the left, you to the right,

You to the gas, you to the slave-gangs.

Rising from Russia and from Poland,

Smoke of six million souls blows warm

Over the sea, it seeks a homeland,

Even the gates of heaven are closed.

Following scripture down the wind,

Where the unwanted go, the wounded,

To Palestina, Palestina,

Leading their children by the hand,

Children of ash and smoke, windblown.

Even the living have no land,

Much less the dead, and so it blows,

Even the gates of heaven are closed

Till this great matter is resolved.

Over the sea to Palestina,

It builds above the land, black weather,

Over the sequels of their murder,

The empire chess, the big promoters

Cheering their champions, cloud that thickens

With smoking towers and empty playgrounds.

Like someone waiting under rubble,

Not even heaven’s gates are open,

The cloud still trapped above the land

After the smoke has cleared, the crying

Has died. Send up into the weather

Prayers for the dead, for heaven to open,

Pray for the cloud-mass to be broken.

Till the great question is resolved,

The gassed, the bombed, the starved, the snipered,

Genocide giving birth to genocide,

In a great cloud above the land,

Shadow the corpse of Palestina.

They crowd around the cold campfire,

Whose flames are black, they sit and stare

Into the coalface of its flickers,

Into the dark of one another.  

The rain falls through them and the sun

Still darkens into dates and sweetens,

The olives green around their stones,

But through the cloud no light can find

A seed of peace in Palestine.

The sea of murder breaks all borders,

Crowding the air with blinded souls,

Leaving the dead gods in their silos

Preserving peace for the elect

In our glass towers, sharing out

War to the poor in their poor quarters,

Grain ground between the grand alliances

Which fight each other like the hands

Of an expensive-suited madman,

Writhing behind his back, and ripping.

But something underground is singing.

They cannot see it in the cloud,

But you can hear it in the night.

The sun, the planets and the stars

Have got their proxies in the ground.

As for millenia once rain poured,

Filling the seas, so light before that

Flooded into the rocks, the mountains,

It snow-fell in the form of song

Out of the mouths of more-than-stars,

Which falling settled in the grain

Of rocks, the fibres of the flowers,

The fabric of the lung, the weave

Of bones. It filtered through the strata

Right to the centre, so the earth

Was soaked with light unseen, love’s daughter.

How many veils love wears – she covers

Her face with light, she wears the world,

To spare the eyes of what we are

From what we were and will be – fires

Blindingly bright. The earth is hot

With just that light, beneath our feet,

Where we go stricken in the street.

It rises up through cracks, like weeds

That rip their weak roots up and float,

Dandelion dragons in the lamplight,

Angels impossible to face,

Thankfully fading, hard to grasp,

Vanishing in the crosstown traffic.

But scratch the surface of the world,

It is still there, the light from nowhere,

And it breaks out in sparks of courage,

And uprightness and bold persistence,

First one or two, then thousands, millions,

Encouraging each other, cracks

Racing across earth’s face and joining,

Till in a flash the mask is vapour.  

And to the watchers in the cloud,

The earth will open like an eye

And look at them, and being seen,

They will shake off their obligation,

Their duty finished, which was grief.

Paths will appear, and stairs, around them,

They will look up, and stretch, and yawn,

And spread their arms and start to spin,

Spiralling up at last. The sky

Above that land at last will clear,

And light will shine on Palestina.

HIDING

My friends are hiding

Among thin reeds.
They are filming

So we will believe.

Over goes the whirring devil,

Hunting, hunting,

Off goes a machine-gun,

Close, and a dog barks.

They have been told to leave,

If found they will die.
Let us hope the good dog

Does not, did not give them away.

LAYLA SAYS.

Layla says

I might not see my homeland

For who knows how many years.

Until it reappears.

Layla says

I came top in exams,

And in Palestine

Such students are visited

By their future professors.

But the candidate numbers got mixed,

Another girl was honoured.

She was baffled, and I, every day,

Set out the coffee cups and waited.

This is alright, says Layla,

And she looks at the sky,

And how sad it is and how funny

And how nothing can be done about it anyway

Pass like slow birds over,

Shapes that cross her large glasses.

She peers from a small zoom square.

Layla says,

How are you over there?

She is going to the market

To buy for her sisters

Presents for their birthday.

One is six, thirteen the other,

But they have the same birthday.

She says she will buy them anything,

Anything she can find, anything.

She buys them T-shirts

With pictures of Pop stars.

They bake a cake over a gas canister.

Layla says

My brother is so brave, in the bombing,

We all huddle in a corner

But he is at the window shouting,

Like at a football match,

There! Another one! Look, there!

They were out on the balcony and her father

Suddenly bundled them all indoors, but not Layla,

She was left out there as the towers

Burst into dust clouds, flaring fire.

Laughing she said, I am not your daughter.

She says the worst thing

Is the sound of glass shattering.

But she found a piece

The shape of Palestine.

She says the mind goes missing.

Her uncle, in a bombardment,

Stood up to speak. He told them, after,

It was a thing of breadth he meant,

A great summation. But all he said was

This is a very big bombardment.

When she stops speaking, Layla says

There is so much I have not said.
If speaking is a time and place,

Then speech is dead.

Again her eyes go up, there is something there.

Through her interior sky they pass over,

Slow as God in their flight.

But when you speak about the wrong and the right,

She turns on you the eyes of a creature

Caged in a public square for years,

Absorbing suffering.

Like at an execution

A glass of water

Full of reflections.

And this is the well of anger,

Of education.

Her studies have been interrupted,

She is going to Hungary.

She must get a health certificate

From the hospital,

She says I hope I will not see any bodies.

But a heap of sheets on the floor

Raised into the air a claw,

Slow as the moon, a bone hand.

And on the way back, a dead girl

With the eyes of her sister.

Her sister cannot look at her,

Nor the others,

They cannot believe she is leaving.

Now Layla is in Cairo.

The mall, she says, could hold all the people in Gaza.

Her uncle says, shall we go to a movie?

Layla says,

We are the film. We have seen everything.

The border shuts behind her.

The poets of Gaza have not been silenced, quite the opposite. But I heard of one case that made me write this.

GIRL, GAZA

She dances like a fire,

She laughs like April rain,

But when her city fell

She never opened a book again

Out of the siege, they say,

She used to cross the sky

On easy wings, but then

She never opened a book again

Up to the morning star

She used to race her car,

Crimson and quick, but then

She never opened a book again

Balancing on that gem

She could see everything

Clear as first love, but then

She never opened a book again

The birds burned in the trees

And the fox drowned in its den,

She lived, and breathed – but then

She never opened a book again

The President picked up a pen

And signed the as and when,

The who and where and how

She never opened a book again

What do the pages hide,

What lost worlds live in them?
So as to lock them in

She never opened a book again.

The black script of the land

And the blank words of the wind

She’ll read right to the end,

And never open a book again