What’s the warp and what the weft
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
