Poem on Today's War ~ Farrah Sarafa

Palestine Fig
By Farrah Sarafa 

Inner worlds lined brown like the earth,

tinted gold like divine mirth,

the occupied race of people plead

for an outside light to dissolve their worry

into the Dead Sea.

Dense bubbles, sugar grains condense

like caramel apple heating

under my hot tongue. I imagine

soldiers' threats induce a similar

effect on their poor children who have long been

constrained to sacrifice

their fame, knowledge and skill. Sweet fig flesh

that grips wrinkled outer skin

like old native man's hands made hallow

from fear, disdain, longing to cry peace by tears

formed from the pain of clouds

waiting to be tasted and felt.

Pains produced from sweet-thirsty twigs,

resting on the earth, come together,

tighten, roll, and shrink into small balls called seeds-

reproduce from the hungers, contempt and needs

of Palestinian

souls. They swim in the memories

of their buried ancestors,

whose lives, disintegrated, nourish

fig tree soils, coalesce to become seeds

that constitute fig fruit.

Hearts gold- earth speckled, firm flavor,

a seeded promise that you

will savor the Arabian air

that you will inhale when you eat a fig

from my ancestors.

 Blood, Sand and Tears of a Young Boy
By Farrah Sarafa

I wipe my tears while they-
they have no tears left to cry.
Dehydrated, like dried pineapple,
the closest they come  to resembling the concentric yellow
and fiber-branching slices
is the tired eye;
swollen and puffed like a pregnant belly
their shadow-plated arches, underneath
reveal how much they question "why."

"For what are you longing,"
I ask, looking into the complicated retina of the young boy.
"What is floating in the water of your deep and narrow well my
dear?"
He only speaks fear.

I feel his mother's cries moving inside of me,
shaking off flower vases and pots of marble stone
from granite table-tops
I shiver; steady in will and
willing to stay, I am made from glass
while this little boy is made from clay.
He is brought to pot by American soldiers
from which the Israelis may drink their raisin-milk in warm,
  making excuses to stay
in my mother's Palestine.

Placing my hand on his cold, winter's chest
I transfer my comforts as warmth, but their flag's pointing west;
  they are looking for help from a nation that is "best,"
though it is we
that have made Iraq into a land of nuclear test.
Missile tanks and planks
for cannonballs make storm in a place where
smoke bombs, tear gases and raping little girls from lower
classes
bring to form
nerve knots and tissue clots
along the green-starred spine of Iraq.
These people need no more tears;
  they are merely
  hungry.

"What does she hide beneath her big red striped gown" he asks,
inquiring of her tasks.
"Rice with cumin-spiced meats and lemon-sesame treats
or niter, sulfur and charcoal dynamite for an endless fight
against the rest of the world," he wonders of her vast plunders.

Desert souls, their tears are made of blood mixed with sand
while I, American, laugh in pain
     at Charlie Chaplin going insane on the television screen.
CNN bulletin interrupts my bliss with news of terrors
about red and flaming wearers
of suicide and contempt.
My laughs push into cries
and form a current for the Arabian Sea
whose crystal salts perspire and become of me.
Her waves undulate like snake-thin layers of blood thickened with
sand and stone
like a serpent's plea to be let free
  and to roam
the Garden of Eden.
America.