Tablets

She pressed her ear against the shell:

she wanted to hear everything

he never told her.

A single inch

separates their two bodies

facing one another

in the picture:

a framed smile

buried beneath the rubble.

Whenever you throw stones

into the sea

it sends ripples through me.

My heart’s quite small:

that’s why it fills so quickly.

Water needs no wars

to mix with water

and fill up spaces.

The tree doesn’t ask why it’s not moving

to some other forest

nor any other pointless questions.

He watches tv

while she holds a novel.

On the novel’s cover

there’s a man watching tv

and a woman holding a novel.

On the first morning

of the new year

all of us will look up

at the same sun.

She raised his head to her chest.

He did not respond:

he was dead.

The person who gazed at me for so long,

and whose gaze I returned for just as long . . .    

That man who never once embraced me,

and whom I never once embraced  . . .    

The rain wrecked the colors around him

on that old canvas.

He was not with the husbands

who were lost and then found;

he did not come with the prisoners of war,

nor with the kite that took her,

in her dream,

to some other place,

while she stood before the camera

to have her smile

glued into the passport.

Dates piled high

beside the road:

your way

of  kissing me.

Rapunzel’s hair

reaching down

from the window

to the earth

is how we wait.

The shadows

the prisoners left

on the wall

surrounded the jailer

and cast light

on his loneliness.

Homeland, I am not your mother,

so why do you weep in my lap like this

every time

something hurts you?

Never mind this bird:

it comes every day

and stops at the branch’s edge

to sing for an hour

or two.

That’s all it does:

nothing makes it happier.

House keys,

identity cards,

faded pictures among the bones . . .    

All of these are scattered

in a single mass grave.

The Arabic language

loves long sentences

and long wars.

It loves never-ending songs

and late nights

and weeping over ruins.

It loves working

for a long life

and a long death.

Far away from home — 

that’s all that changed in us.

Cinderella left her slipper in Iraq

along with the smell of cardamom

wafting from the teapot,

and that huge flower,

its mouth gaping like death.

Instant messages

ignite revolutions.

They spark new lives

waiting for a country to download,

a land that’s little more

than a handful of dust

when faced with these words:

“There are no results that match your search.”

The dog’s excitement

as she brings the stick to her owner

is the moment of opening the letter.

We cross borders lightly

like clouds.

Nothing carries us,

but as we move on

we carry rain,

and an accent,

and a memory

of another place.

How thrilling to appear in his eyes.

She can’t understand what he’s saying:

she’s too busy chewing his voice.

She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss,

at the shoulder she’ll never cry on,

at the hand she’ll never hold,

and at the ground where their shadows meet.