after W.B. Yeats
for the children of Gaza
Here and there a brief light flickers, a slow turning-
on of the red dead programs, groaning and
breathing out ice. Here and there the turning
wings, the singing blast, a steel grey rip in
a shot-blue sky. And, and, and, the-
re they lay, upon the crumbling ground that is widening
between their legs, swallowing them up in an endless gyre.
It is a new day; a new death hangs from the
walls of this unholy land. A screaming falcon
encircles her nest. The sun cannot
dry the blood from our faces quickly enough, cannot hear
our cries to Allah, is only an averted eye when the
falcon returns, and we see again the shredded face of the falconer.
Into the heart of blackness, things
lack form, coarse fingers grip my chest and fall
onto my bleeding legs stretched apart,
the red weeping calling upon the
indifferent earth as the centre
is split again, again, again, until it cannot
hold; nothing can ever hold…
Nothing can ever disappear, it can mere-
ly be crushed, grated down, pulverized, until anarchy
and sadism and chaos and extermination is
fertilized by everything left behind. Death is loosed
from his chains. He descends upon
the grey-soaked city in the
night, when all things are naked to the world.
A scorched earth is all that is left, the
bronze sheen of the desert reflecting in their blood-
less eyes, sore and tired, dimmed
and desperate, swirling between dreams and reality on a tide
of exhaustion. What is a dream, and what is
a nightmare that has stretched its bony fingers and is loosed
into the screaming real? And, and, and
what is a restless sleep that echoes everywhere?
One thousand blindfolded men are kneeling naked on the
cement ground as stadium lights bathe them in a ceremony
of submission, of humiliation, of
inferiority. These men have no innocence;
they have seen and felt the bombs and blood. The night is
smothering their mouths as their screams are drowned.
The road beyond is crossed with bullets and the-
ir withering trails. Bodies move like puppets. At its best,
the camp writhes like a worm, lack-
ing any motive except to consume and excrete. All
appendages have been gnawed off. At its worst, the conviction
of paralysis blankets the camp like a damp towel, while
the tent fabrics wave in the desert wind. Outside, the
quiet circles, the red eyes, the fear of the worst.
Frost creeps into my veins. Placid stones are
rising from the soft ground, silent and full
of sadness. The green and blue horizon is of-
ten obscured by the fog of future disaster. The passionate
have sunk into the earth, reverberating a hollow intensity.
Here is a sacred turn of the sun that will surely
bring a new light to cast a new shadow over our faces. Some-
times words choke my throat. A new revelation
is reforged from the dead thrum. It is
webbed, sticky, more dead than alive. At
times I feel it reach out its alien hand.
The rubble chatters and pops like hot coals. Surely
this is where it all will burn. Where it all will scrape off the
scaly exterior and expose the raw, pulsing core. After a second
it will shrivel and dry and die like everything else. Coming
closer to the heart of the gyre. Is it love? Is
it faith? Will it leave a stain? Is it at
the crossroads of two beings? Is a Second Coming near at hand?
And, in a millisecond, it blooms, like a flower, like the
first bite of the apple, like the second
crawl after exile, like the third cry coming
from the sinewed undergrowth, oh! hardly
have we felt the falcon’s sting, the phallic point, before we are
stripped and opened and sterilized like those
diagrams and research papers whose words
are branded onto our cheeks, our tongues turned inside out.
Deep in the hot shadows, graveyards tilt east when
the sky seems a thin paper or a mirage or a
shattered frame. Smoke plumes like a vast
exhale, a sigh of distress and desperation, an image
frozen in its ferocity, a dangling of limbs with out-
stretched arms of stony melancholy, of
feral sadness, as if consumed by a grieving spiritus
animalis, a silent groaning growling stupor mundi.
The camp swells like a wound. Troubles
become catastrophes. Salt fills my
eyes and the rootless earth. Women walk sight-
less and numb. It all scatters somewhere
across the universe. It all fits in-
side of a keffiyeh. It all chokes with sunburned sands.
I hope I wake with a throat made of
wood. It will vibrate when I touch it to the
palm of my hand. My hand is a forgotten desert.
The wind sings in an ancient tongue, a
language of stitching infinities, the shape
of a turning wheel made gnarled and weathered with
a prodding road. The skin of a lion
flaps wildly in the humming air. His body
was left in the street. A bullet in his cheek and
sorrow in his eyes. Why does the
wind not sing any louder? His bleeding head,
a gentle rhythm, the sharp fragments of
metal and mourning. Can the wind hum a
song that carpets in a shadow the silence of man?
I have no house, this land is a
lifeless child. I pray for you, Gaza.
This beautiful land is now a blank
emptiness, indifferent and voiceless and
cold. So cold. And they turn away their pitiless
gaze. So cold. The frost is creeping up, as-
king me: Why does night set the
world on fire? So cold like the sun.
Silent night, another night that is
salivating for flesh, the moon slowly moving
its quiet pulpy limbs through the sea of stars, its-
elf a reflection of earth’s own slow
metamorphosis, into an organism sans dieu, all thighs
rubbing against others, no space to move one’s mouth while
the transformation, mutilation, purification, all-
eviation etches its permanent scars across and about
the ocean floor. This is life, this is death, and what of it.
And what of it? After a year and my own skin will reel
from the touch of a white feather, from brief shadows
of colorful fabric, from a gentle beating of
an aged heart. After seventy-four years and the
dead are deflated and decomposed. The earth’s indignant
laugh is all that is heard. No wonder the desert
seeks to bury us in its sand and fossils and carnivorous birds.
Sleep comes in violent strikes. I have only the
hollow midnight breath for comfort in the cold darkness.
A flashing in the sky, it drops
like a flower into the smoky horizon, again, again,
again, a garland of fiery red roses, a kaleidoscope of dead but-
terflies, a glistening of red-hexed jewels. Now-
here is safe. Nowhere is without death. And everywhere else is i-
ndifferent to it all. I don’t know.
I wake and the claustrophobic sky presses us further down. That
is no country for young men. Another day, another twenty
massacred in the golden hours. The sun takes centuries
to sink back into the charred horizon. What of
it. With my hands rubbed raw, I climb the stony
mountain that leads to the bottom of the earth. Then I can finally sleep.
This is where they were
sunken. A bleak stage play encircled by vexed
animals. Closer and closer now. To-
wards sunset, towards nothing. A nightmare
in the intestinal worm. And, and, and by
the time I come around, my eyes open, a-
nd at last I can understand, rocking
by my side, a gentle baby, in a quiet cradle.
And that is all and
it must die what
mouths stuff my rough
nails in the heart of the beast
again and again and its
wicked smile every hour
of the day week year come
home I need you all round
the cracking ashes at
the end of every thing at last.
Everything. It makes its weary journey. Presses against the cool mountain face, slouches
against time’s haggard shoulder. What else can it do. Go on, go on, towards
the moon’s broken bulb, towards the fossilized stars above Bethlehem.
Go on to the hidden oceans, the dreamless realm, a world to
fall on your knees at last. In the morning I will be,
at last, a child newly born.
Note: this poem takes a golden shovel poetic form, inspired by W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, “The Second Coming”. Reading the last word of each line will reveal Yeats’s original poem (with the exception of line 105––the original word gaze is changed to Gaza). The golden shovel was developed by poet Terrence Hayes; read more about it here.
