Poem: Gaza-Bombay Suture

Running through this weaving?

-Kabir

By the tongue where tomorrow and yesterday are one, call

a thread of chalk on liquid blackboard

Sutra of future past and tense - present

to court of recall

ash - snow of extinction, settler dust

The milk glass moon - gazing

in tombstone silence above Khan Younis,

our museum shoulders each drag and shrug

Jabaliya, the abattoir of Gaza City

tiny ocean

in the land where yesterday and tomorrow are one

Blood-soaked gauze

- my first born

on replicating screens, shape sifters ingress

Bear witness, hands

whose wounds, rivers unsleeping

sieve at airport lounges, arrivals, departures, stations of be/longing in crosshairs

Steeping into seas, seas rising into clouds, clouds falling into grains

grains moaning into ears.

cameras crane as egrets of yesteryears

She who sees, heard of the herd *Sea Between Lands

dark water kissing feet of her dead, aqueous return

on the necks of the indentured buffalo

Is anyone left? Call the salt-weathered olive, emblem

of Palestine, black mourning, green despair, bruise-purple open-ended liquid yielding

circling the ever changing crowds

Beyond four directions, bread - bride of the olive, making us kin, even

as we break

hearts beat & beat beads of heat

Liminal dove, hoverer

halfway house of heaven and earthly shove, bomb blast, feather-singed

on curved concrete hemline, they ripple, reappear

Final and primal, survivor - exploded h/earth, no millimeter unscarred,

be/holder of charred

the scenes necklace, repeat, rosaries of despair

* Sea Between Lands is the english translation of the Mediterranean Sea which borders Gaza

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator