Humid summer night in Taybeh-Ramallah Palestine
light scent of mule-blood and goat-dung drifting into
the open window of my bronze-walled hotel room
I’m drinking a deliciously cold Heineken beer
and writing words that say writing words
loud Arabic Coca-Cola truck stammering
through the village, red and enormous with
black wheels turned white-beige from the road
or was it a snarling green bulldozer
or a whinnying yellow tank

peeling off my socks and rolling my slacks
up to my knees in bed with all the lights on writing
words that become family
and all this description speaks more to nothingness
than to the night
and more to an absent and incommunicable god
than to the village
a tattered and despondent refugee camp
red-soiled groves of olive trees among
champagne-colored lamplight
and mule-blood
fuchsia sunrise
gushing over Taybeh-Ramallah at dawn
in a delirium from lack of sleep
I call it the magnanimity of God’s beauty

and the more I write the less cold the beer stays
four frenzied years of Intifada with killed infants
stacked two thousand high in my soul
twenty people slain today in Gaza and
two babies
with bloody faces, soft blood, soft mushy skulls
mashed in
white sack of weight in wailing mother’s arms
disconsolate mother, ikon of holy Palestine
in a musky, redolent and violaceous mosque
there’s no point to my writing
to my anything
when I can’t stop
babies in Palestine
from being killed

Written June 2004, while visiting his village.

Edward Salem is a Palestinian-American who lives in Sterling Heights. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conte, Left Curve, Dispatch, Lampshade and Muscadine Lines. This fall Edward begins his MFA in Writing candidacy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He can be reached at edwardsalem27 (at) yahoo (dot) com.