By Bassemah (2)

What connects me to a place

I’ve always known but never occupied,

whose vivid memories dance like fairy tales in my mind?

Their stories become my connections

brought late at night

mixed in with ancient lullabies.

The water had to be boiled for the bath

in the village.

The baker only a short walk away.

The strength of her grandmother,

the cruelty of her school teachers,

boundless dreams,

and the fondness of her love

swim in the sea of my memories.

Love letters carved onto oranges,

read in tree branches,

consumed without a trace,

with the insatiable want of a forbidden fruit

live in my narrative now.

He was a city boy, an Old City boy,

and reckless.

More connections I discovered

at sunrise before school

over strong coffee and cigarettes.

He was young, a boxer, and a charmer.

He defended the weak in the streets,

held a Jordanian rifle,

an antique,

on this side of the fence,

and hunted birds with the boys

in the hills near the caves.

He flirted with British girls

because he could,

and left his homeland at nineteen

for a better life

and forty years.

To them I am connected.

And to the refugee I’m connected

Who inherits not a fortune in property

but a fortune in loss?

Ours is a connection to what we

are prohibited from knowing again.

Pushed off at gunpoint,

or by stories, and recollections…

a massacre at a bordering village,

or killed,

leaving those left to grieve

in suicidal desperation.

How can we talk about connections?

Ours were severed in 1948

with more to fade since ‘67

and daily in hostilities at airports

and checkpoints

or demolitions

for the birth of another homeless

family

longing for that which connected them

to their past,

to their future,

seeing and hearing and smelling it

crushed before them,

surrounded by rocks

and well guarded machine guns.

We are longing for that connection

which bleeds inside of us

like aching memories of that tender soil

clinging to the severed remains

of yet another tree of olives uprooted,

disconnected from its home

In Palestine.

03/2005 Bassemah