The call to prayer

 What if the call to prayer is a call to bleed? 

-Pete Greig, Red Moon Rising 

Privilege

What does the watcher see?

Another betrayal, another hillside occupied

It's pain, keys and deeds nothing more than playthings, monopoly money 

Fear turns to hatred, dividing

Succumbing to a lure for backyards and "security" 

What does the nation-state say about purity? 

Ethnic, cultural, lingual 

Still, how am I to blame? This land has no people. This land is not built upon. It's empty, it's waiting, it's calling for its Sons. (Nevermind the village ruins under the forest, etched on the plain.) 

What does the watcher see?

Insistence and weariness 

Against the unremitting mountain of privilege

Privilege is never neutral, there's always a sacrifice 

Privilege is never given up, it's always strengthened

Privilege is inherited and blinding, always dehumanizing 

"Like those others, I had been trying to find the easy life of blindness to pain." Elias Chacour (p.223 "Blood Brothers") 

More than Solomon

Strewn petals always seem extravagant, 

An indulgence,

A red carpet invitation to a premier of being present, 

Alive and awake. 

The overflow tomb

I'm buried in an overflowing tomb, suffocating under the lies made by heroes on the edge of madness finalizing their conquest of cleansing (but just one more)- one more village left, one more enemy to vanquish, one more WMD, one more mother to bereft; 

The modern retelling of history casting long and politically correct shadows onto crusader temples, turn left and you'll find the Roman Colosseum, the ruins of the rampages and despicable (unspeakable) sacrifices, turn right and you'll find the wells and the tombs, the ancient names renamed after each conquest. 

Past the stones piled up covering dishonorable women, the graves marking the casualties of tribal feuds, revenge killings;

Turn around and remember at the memorials of sons killed by rockets, drones, militants, terrorists, settlers/occupiers/commanders/chiefs/generals/presidents. The carnage of knives and bombs and guns, the us and them, the endless blame;

The weariness of cycles, of shellings, shelters beyond capacity, the funerals disrupted, the death on all sides erupted, fear corrosive, claiming, naming;

Who can break a narrative, create a new story that captures truth with beauty and never boasts or idealizes or blacklists as savages, but names, like the speaker for the dead, a deep knowing and telling, of what is and was and what will be, a new vision, a future, a city, a King. 

Damascus

Scandal of cohesion 
Promises and proclamations sung to 
Temper the rubble 
Ravaged and revenged 
Wholly recompensed; the word fulfilled 

Glorious grace
Unbounded mercy
Unfounded and unleashed 
Upon a city Named
“My joy is in her” 
(Isaiah 17, 19; Jeremiah 49)

Enlivening

The silky rags washed down
so the brown blood circles the edges of the sink.
Like self abandonment swirling, dank as bile in the back of the throat, familiar disconnection, shadows.
Waiting under the cover of Oleander petals, the orphaned shackles, the disembodied pain.
Unforgiveness settling like dust from a sandstorm, in every nook and cranny. Covering. 

Every idiom judged and exposed, every sacrifice mocked and belittled.
Who is this scorn-slayer,
this false judge, deceiver?
Birther of lies and nurturer of darkness, systems maker
Enthroned for a time until the Divine
reckoning, the dragon slatted to be slain and cast out, down down down.

She doesn't know he's hunting her down, targeted and entrapped.
Whittling her down to nothing, hopelessness.

She doesn't know there is one who has come, and will come, is coming, with cold clear water for cleaning, who puts on plastic gloves and washes sinks, who removes the gloves and washes feet, offers glasses of water for drinking, thirst-quenching. Who holds out a hand in friendship, a ring of adoption, a home for healing, who pours out forgiveness like water, filling every nook and cranny. Enlivening.

Petals

And echos and ions

Of pink scaffolding billowing

Whispering 

If this beauty is so fading it almost feels frivolous, so exorbitant, luxurious
But here we stand 

At the end of everything 

Covered in pink magnolias 

Petals 

Petals 

Petals, gone.