“A woman soldier shouted…Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, In Jerusalem
My brother vomited blue Gatorade into the Dead Sea,
abandoned a string of plastic bags along the highway
that cut through the desert. We joked in the back of the
minivan that, a millennia from now, archeologists
will study the remains, dedicate entire institutions
to unraveling the divine mysteries of dehydration.
In a hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean, I dream
of summers spent running. Weaving between fir trees,
barefoot, while human men barked like dogs,
how we ducked down into the belly of a canoe
to avoid capture, collapsed on the cafeteria floor
while seventeen-year-olds with bullhorns draped flags
around our shoulders. Kachol v’levan, hatzevah shel mi?
This summer, I traversed a maze of olive groves
and border walls, souvenir stands catty-corner
to checkpoints where children with machine guns
Whatsapp’ed their mothers for permission to come
home to do laundry. How many American Jewish
children spend their Julys watching pita bread burn
on the hump of an overturned bowl, a denied passport
signed in crayon crumpled in their fist? How many
ancestors are mourning from Eden the lives
their descendants took in their names?
Maybe this is how the daughters
of insurrectionists felt as their fathers
stormed the capital. The shame-rage-grief
of watching the same men who peeled
our clementines and tended scraped knees
howling in the streets for another people’s annihilation.
Who will teach them that the world does not need to
belong to us for us to belong in it? I once wept outside
a Domino’s in Jerusalem while the buses didn’t run,
parted ways with the child who grew up believing
that somewhere home was waiting for her. But that
same girl stood on tiptoe to peer over the partition to
watch men dance while snot dried on her sleeve.
She observed soldiers buying yogurt from
convenience stores with automatic weapons
slung across their backs while the cashier blew her
gum and asked “paper or plastic” in English.
My father marches across the National Mall
as I split dates with my thumbs in a Brooklyn
brownstone, unearthing the pit with my teeth.
He chants Am Yisrael Chai! and the IDF arrests
a nine-year-old for throwing rocks at a tank,
bombing hospitals and bull dozing ancestral homes
to rubble. And suddenly, I’m standing in the doorway
of a synagogue in Tzfat, forbidden from entering,
while my brother plays Angry Birds on his iPhone
in a pair of basketball shorts. My homeland is a sea of salt
where nothing can survive, a metal detector over my
tallit bag, impenetrable thresholds and desert ruins.
I know my history. So when my father rallies for Israel,
home throws itself off a cliff. It writhes on the slab of earth
my ancestors carved in the dirt, molds in the bottom of
the bread bag, riddled with spores. I return to the Kotel
and climb between blocks of stone, crawl inside folded
prayers, clusters of capers. Because once, I dreamt of
meeting my granddaughter in the holy city.
When I arrived, I found my father with his hands
wrapped around the little girl’s throat, her lips
tinged blue, rimmed in white. Didn’t I kill you?
he asked me, as her body sagged, lifeless
between his hands. No, you tore our roots
from the earth, called it a garden, I replied,
my belly full of stones. Now, as my father
paints stripes across his cheeks, a flag held tight
in his fist, I imagine the little girl he slaughtered
fleeing home. She meets her twin in the Jordan River
Valley and together, they plant pomegranate seeds
and olive pits in the sand. An orchard rises
between the dunes beneath a new moon.
