Visiting Auschwitz (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
In the rebuilt café where the bride exploded with the glass, we order cappuccino to sip with our cigarettes. Across the invisible line, only Arabic coffee. In Gaza they make rockets from lead pipe and nails. We say animals. Is a body worth a body? What if it has wept in the rain? Whispered the ninety-nine names of God and claimed one for itself. In the first light. Before morning.
We ate labneh and bread in your tents When we had no water we drew it from your well Your camels carried the sand to build our houses you built them—your hands— Fig-tree prickly-pear human-flood You were the wasteland we made bloom