Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon,
                      that have I given unto you
                                    ~Joshua 1:3

who will sort the bodies

    from the silent rubble;

who will push the barrow,

    who will wield the shovel

to dig the graves

    in this blood soaked ground—

blood of foe mixed

    with blood of friend,

who once had lived

    in hatred bound—

someone tell me please:

    what will Gaza look like

       when the killing ends?

On Some Lines by Mahmoud Darwish

      “On the day when my

          words were stones…”

                  ~from “Psalm Three”

Why do his words catch in my throat,

as though they were spiders in my soup?

They do not crawl or build a web,

they only lie on a page, line upon line,

like layers of sediment revealed by a road cut.

They are his voice turned to stone,

coursed like those ashlar temple walls.

They pave the road the poet had traveled,

and will linger long past his departure—

each flag, another line of his poem,

written as though the very ink

was squeezed from rock.