Beirut Survivors Anonymous

My generation was lost. Cities
too. And nations.
—Czeslaw Milosz

In Beirut on good
nights I watch rockets fly
over rooftops until my eyes hurt.
I listen for names of the dead
on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.
I remove my contacts by candlelight
and flush my eyes with Dettol.

Years later, now
I pick up the telephone
needing to call someone who remembers.
I have always been alone. But now I sink
and it's not the Mediterranean.
I fly coach cross-continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.
We are walking to school. It is May.
It is sixteen years ago. Strawberries
piled high on carts explode. Bits of cars
and shrapnel and glass melt
on our skin. I help the strawberry
vendors pick strawberries
from the gutter. Later, my mother
spreads yogurt on my burns.

We lived a war with no name
and escaped. We now belong to a culture
that has no name.

My generation drives BMWs
down streets in Los Angeles or Long Island
popping ecstacy pills hoping to be artistic,
chanting for Hare Hare Krishna on the corner
of College and 13th, wishing for a flying roadblock,
Howitzers, snipers, anything
to replace the monotony of oceans
for the rhythm of the Mediterranean.

It is for nights of unrelenting shelling
we long, for the calm of corridors and neighbors
boiling coffee until dawn, for gunpowder seeping
through shut windows and the wails
of a single ambulance.

We drink arak in Oriental restaurants
in Denver or Burbank or Fort Lauderdale.
We watch belly-dancers and vomit hummous
with no garlic, hummous as thick as coffee
at the aub milkbar. We live in a daze
longing for green plums and salt,
the ecstacy of Howitzers on a school night.

You can look in our eyes
and see we've been to Beirut. We are not amiable
to snipers unless they are aiming at us. Our eyes
change color in the dark, the dark of basements,
corridors and bathrooms with no windows.
We are experiencing post-traumatic stress
somewhere in Massachusetts, Colorado.
We don't attend Beirut Survivors Anonymous.
We still smell the gunpowder and salty cheese
bubbling on pastry for breakfast.
We can still hear the wind hissing
after a car-bomb.

We are the remains of a Howitzer,
a 155, of Merkavas and T-72s
and soldiers at checkpoints who steal
our Raybans. We are young
and need to shield our eyes.

Bride of the South

And the eye yearns toward Zion,
and weeps.
—Yehuda Amichai

Bulldozers razed your pomegranate trees
and soldiers in heavy boots
cracked your jugs of olive oil.

You wanted to die
so you smiled and wore your wedding dress.

Gazing at the sea, the chained horizon,
"yes," you said, "I will die and gladly."

The night of the wedding
you danced and loaded your old Mercedes
with four hundred kilograms of tnt.
After years of civil war
finally an enemy
an enemy to conquer.

You fixed your hair
and rubbed your face with rose water.
The villagers sang to you from the streets.
You ate your last pomegranate
and stained your white dress.

Your mother closed her eyes
as your brothers wired the car.
You embraced her
and she kissed your eyelashes.

Your sisters showered you with rice
as you drove out of sight
towards the tanks
and Heaven.

Your grooms
in their Merkavas
cradling Uzis
waited.

Arabes Despatriados

1.

No one believes me when I say
my ancestors found America.
Phoenicians in wooden boats
sailed the Mediterranean past Carthage
and Marseille, the Canary Islands
and weeks on rough waters
to America.

They had olive skin, dark hair,
one eyebrow. They could read
and write. They traded with Israelites,
Assyrians, and when they landed
on the new continent did not cry out
India!

They did not run back for gold
or black men. They had the alphabet.
They had no use for chains.
After years of sailing they always went home
to Saida, Tyre, Byblos or Sarafand
hilly cities facing the sea, facing west,
where they built houses and pressed olives.

2.

My ancestors built Granada
carved water canals in the earth
to feed the orange trees of Andalusia.
When I stand on top of a mountain
at Orgiva, Granada at my feet,
water from Esekiahs trickling

down hillsides, I suck on a sweet fig
and imagine my grandfathers planting fig trees
before they discovered the New World
before they were labeled Hungaros,
Arabes Despatriados,
terrorists.

3.

My grandfather's house in Saida
faced the sea. He too sailed
the Mediterranean past Gibraltar
and the Azores
to America.

In Hermosillo he found Carmen
her skin as smooth as the sea
on August nights. When war broke out
he traveled north to California
to buy and sell. He grew a mustache
and grew tired of trains and the dust
clinging to his boots. He sailed
back home to Saida alone
and never loved again.

4.

In California, in the midst
of drought ridden summers
I can feel my grandfather's longing
for the crashing of waves,
the salt on Carmen's skin,
the dust of Baja, a shot of Tequila
and the smell of his textile factory
in Hermosillo.

And when I stand on top of a hill
at Skyros, Latchi or Antibes
and look east I can see my ancestors

Sailing the Mediterranean, heading east
heading home
away from rough Atlantic waters
away from the people who would later
call them Hungaros, Arabes Despatridos,
terrorists.