Where we all are. One year later

It’s been almost a year since I was last in the West Bank this past August. It’s been over a year since May of 2007 when I left the first time after nearly five months living in the city of Nablus. I started this blog to convey my experiences there to friends, family, and whoever else might happen to read it. My hope all along was that in some small way readers could come to see the people I knew and the places I saw as I knew them and as I saw them: in a personal light.

Well, this blog is done now, but before I stop for good, I thought I’d pull one last entry out of my sleeve. This is an update on some of my closest friends from Nablus (all names have been changed) most of whom have shown up at some point or another in my earlier blog entries. This then is where we all are, one year later.

Sharif was one of my closest friends in Nablus. There was not a single moment in public when he was not cracking a smile or pulling a practical joke on someone. Sharif was the one who once wrote on a chalkboard in my classroom “Life is a camera, so smile”. He also told me the story about fooling the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints by pretending he spoke only French—with anyone else I’d be sure they were just joking with me, with Sharif you considered that he just might be crazy enough to do it. In private he was much the same, but with intermittent moments of cold hard seriousness. Still, he was never bitter. I think I admired that the most about him.
Sharif was born with a limp—one of his legs was shorter than the other—and had undergone seven surgeries on it since he was a child. Each surgery failed to correct the limp, and he underwent an eighth and final surgery when I was still in Nablus. By the time I came back to visit last August, he had been on crutches for three or four months. Still, same smile and laugh.

We’ve e-mailed a few times since then. He asked for my help looking for ways to come to America for college. We looked at visa application forms, and college transfer applications, and scholarship applications, and decided that barring a miracle he would have to borrow money at home somehow, we even hypothesized that he could borrow the money for a few days from extended family, print a bank statement showing that he had enough money to support himself for a year in America as per the student visa requirements, then return the money immediately thereafter. It was not a hopeless situation, but neither of us had real answers. After a month or two without contact from him, I e-mailed and asked him if he still was thinking about college in America.

He wrote back saying he wasn’t sure. “Sometimes, I just want to stop thinking. Do you understand what I mean?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, only that I couldn’t stand the thought of him ever giving up.

Adam and Hassan don’t show up in any of my blog entries, but I spent uncounted evenings with the two of them joyriding around the city before the army incursions began after midnight, sitting at hookah bars, coffee shops, and our favorite downtown pizza joint (they always insisted they pay). They showed a complete disregard for my host organization’s curfew rules, and lived in the moment, recklessly, with a wild verve for life and companionship. They lied to their fathers, both of whom I knew rather well, about where they were and when they would be back so that they could squeeze out just another quarter hour of joyriding or lounging around town.

Adam was one of the founders and managers of the Children’s Center that hosted Nablus’ champion youth ping pong team and where I taught a roomful of little boys aged five to twelve every Monday and Wednesday for three months. All of the managers were young, and they were some of the kindest people I met in Nablus. Many of the people whose stories follow were managers at that same center. He had spent a year in an Israeli jail for breaking the permit/checkpoint system that restricts freedom of movement from region to region within the West Bank. The real reason he was arrested was because he had spent time working as a junior level political operative for what both the United States and Israel classify as a terrorist organization. Because of his history, and allegations of his continued involvement with said organization (which he denies, though rumors in Nablus flew thick and fast around the subject until no one could be sure of anything) he was recently arrested again and has been in another Israeli jail now for over half a year. His father, a local school teacher, joined him in jail a few months after his arrest. They leave behind a younger brother and sister/son and daughter, neither older than ten.

I lost touch with Hassan soon after Adam’s arrest. I asked after him through mutual friends. They only told me that he was incurably lonely.

Iman, whose personal account of being arrested during the 2007 February invasion of Nablus can be read here, was another manager at the Children’s Center. He won a scholarship to study for a summer in Jordan, then finished his degree in computer science and is now looking for a job in Nablus.

Kareem was an eighteen year old bear. Six-foot, massive, and with a face that wore two expressions: a surly frown, or a childlike grin. Still, for all that, he was timid and afraid sometimes. He was the one who first told me about Iman's arrest and asked me to come save him if he himself were ever arrested.

I spoke with Kareem on the phone once while I was in Cairo for those two summer months between leaving Nablus and coming back to visit for August. Because of the Children’s Center’s association with Adam and his assumed political leanings, all of the managers had come under threat from an opposing faction’s henchmen. Kareem told me on the phone how they had come to his house and shot at him and one of our friends, how they had hidden from the gunfire, how someone’s elderly mother died of a heart attack from fright, and how they were dragged off, interrogated and beaten.

I never spoke with Kareem again. In August Adam and Hassan told me to stay away from him without giving me clear reasons. Rumor from a friend of a friend in local intelligence had it that some of Adam’ circle of friends had been turned spy so as to keep a closer watch on him. I am fairly certain this is what happened to Kareem and a few other friends from the Children’s Center whom I never saw again. Mostly it makes me sad what happened. The only thing that makes me angry is imagining what sort of intimidation, what sort of threats and bullying they must have had to use on Kareem to make him spy on his own friends.

One of my favorite memories I have with Kareem was when we were walking back to the center together after watching the children at a soccer match. Kareem turned to me and asked, “Brian, would you ever kill someone?” I looked at him a moment before answering. “I don’t want to kill anyone ever,” I told him, “unless someone I love will die if I don’t.” And he smiled at me, his childlike smile. “You’re just like me then.”

The Children’s Center where we all worked was burned down by those same henchmen around the same time. I am told the children cried, though I only got to see a few of them again after that—the political situation was too unstable when I visited in August and my host organization worried about what would happen if I were seen associating with the losing side. The managers wanted to rebuild and restart, but were forced to wait until things calmed down in the city for fear it would just be burned down again. They are still waiting.

Muhammad was the former paramedic whose brother died two years before I met him. But he was always a clown—literally! He and his friends started a small circus group in hope of bringing a little fun and laughter to Palestinian children’s lives. I am unashamed to say that he is one of the most admirable people I know, and the world would be a better place if we could all be only half as good a person as he.

Muhammad tried to give three of us volunteers clowning lessons. It was much harder than I thought. Clowning is serious business. He began by holding up a plastic red clown nose, elastic string and all.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked us. “This” he pronounced, “is the smallest business suit in the world.” If he hadn’t been so serious we might have laughed at him.

We then proceeded to practice our clown faces: “there are at least ten degrees between the happiest you can get, and the saddest you can get. Show it on your faces”. Muhammad was a surprisingly stern clown teacher, and it was surprisingly uncomfortable to breath through that clown nose the whole time.

This past winter Muhammad got engaged to a friend of mine who volunteered at the same time with us. They’re getting married this summer or as soon as possible, and we hope they will be very happy together.

Faizan carried himself with more dignity at the age of twenty-two than most people attain in their lifetimes. He was the friend who told me that if the soldiers hit him at the checkpoints he would hit them back even if it cost him his life. He was also the older brother of Mu’min, the drippy nosed four year old whom I wrote about in one entry. The first memory I have of Faizan was when, before I even started teaching at the Children’s Center, the children heard that I knew some martial arts.

“Faizan knows karate!” one of the children shouted, “Fight with Faizan!”

I looked embarrassedly at Faizan, and Faizan, with his typical composure, simply stood there and said “Ok, try to hit me if you want.”

So I half-heartedly threw a punch and he blocked it and countered. I backed up and threw some kicks, just to prove to him and the kids that I could do it, then he got in under my range and it turned into a breathless little bit of feints and soft punches at which I definitely lost. By the end, naturally we were great friends forever.

I distinctly remember one night Faizan insisted he accompany me back to the international apartment—the inner city wasn’t safe at night for foreigners. Before we parted ways, he looked out over the city lights dipping into the narrow valley, and he told me he’d sworn to himself he would not run from Palestine.

“This is where I will build my life, this is where I will make my work, start my family, here in my country.”

So it surprised me when I received an e-mail from him just two months ago from Saudi Arabia. It said: "My friend Brian, how are you? How is your life? Things here are very beautiful. There are no checkpoints, no shooting, everything is stable compared to our situation in Palestine. Sometimes I feel that you and the others have forgotten us and don’t care about us. But for us, we will never forget you, not until the last day of our lives, because for us when we choose a friend and they prove themselves to us we will never forget them. So I am waiting for your response to this e-mail, because you are still my friend and a brother until the last day of our lives. Your brother, Faizan”

It took me two weeks to write Faizan back. When I did, I told him I could never forget him or Palestine and my friends there.

Sometimes it’s hard to stay in touch with my friends from Nablus, because our lives are so different. I catch myself thinking of them when I have a day to sit around the house and do whatever I want. When I visit a particularly nice shopping center to have dinner at a restaurant with old college friends. When I try to imagine having my ideal job, or getting married and starting a family. It’s guilt born of empathy and friendship. There are days and nights when things resurface so vividly, and guilt drives my mind up the walls looking for some way through to help them. What if I could get Sharif into the country and set him up to live with me while he goes to school? How can I get Adam and his father out of jail? Whatever happened to Kareem; is he safe? And I see again the faces of all the children I taught at that center, leaping up and down and shouting “Teacher! Teacher! Pick me, pick me!” before they even knew the question I was about to ask them.

Most of the time I think in terms of the greater good: there has to be a better way to most effectively contribute to the world. But other times I wonder, if I’m not helping the friends who are right in front of my face, just what the hell am I doing? And sometimes I surrender despairing and contemplate how much easier it would be if I just dropped the idealism and guilt.

I’ve taken to praying, because I just don’t know, and because I suspect I can’t handle things like this on my own. I haven’t come up with answers, but it helps clear things out and lends perspective. All I know is that people need people, and so I’ve turned to you in a way, because these are my friends, and so are you, and I need you to see them as people, even if only for awhile in little snatches of human connectivity, as if that way I might be doing a tiny something for them, as if that way they might know that they are never forgotten.

Angry Letters to Congress

Dear Congressman/Congresswoman,

I know that you must receive countless letters by mail and e-mail from your constituents, and I do not know how I could claim that this one, above all others, might be most worthy of your attention, but I am nonetheless compelled to write to you because no one is better able to help than you.

A friend’s father, one Dr. Sami al-Arian, a professor and Muslim American citizen, has been held in prison past his release date and is now being tried for contempt of court for refusing to testify at a grand jury. To be clear, Dr. al-Arian landed in jail only after being found not guilty on the sixteen charges related to terrorism, financing terrorism, or terrorist connections. He was then told that federal prosecutors would re-try him indefinitely and faced with long and costly trials, he accepted a plea bargain whereby he pled guilty to one minor charge and was given five years jail time, after which he was to be deported. I’d like to put aside the polemics of that initial trial and plea bargain to get to my main point: the prosecutors made a legally-binding verbal promise to Dr. al-Arian while arranging the plea-bargain that he would not have to stand trial again. Nobody disputes the fact, and I have been told the prosecutors themselves will bear witness to the fact.

This last is a horrific perversion of what should be the best justice system in the world. I am proud to say I am American, but I cannot and will not abide by abominations perpetrated by my government’s judiciary against her own people. Dr. al-Arian has served the jail time proscribed for him—actually it expired some months ago. Please, do what you can, speak out, speak with people, anything to aid this poor man and his family. It is enough to break most people’s hearts that Dr. al-Arian’s children will follow him and his wife into exile far from the only home they’ve ever known, but for them to continue to be separated, without due cause, in fear and uncertainty over their father’s fate is more than unkind, it is cruel and it is unjust.

Dr. al-Arian’s plight is unacceptable, and leaves me to conclude one of two things. Either this is the kind of treatment that all American citizens can come to expect at the hands of their federal judiciary, so overzealous to chase down terrorists that it willfully makes a mockery of our fundamental rights. Or this is an example of unequal treatment in a country founded on and priding itself on the principle of equality. Whichever the case may be, it should be a matter of concern for all, and I pray that your intercession may hold some sway in the timely resolution of this awful situation.

Respectfully,

Brian J. Loo

Links to more information:

www.freesaminow.com

http://socialistworker.org/2008/07/02/feds-contempt-for-justice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Arian

This summer, soon after I first moved into my apartment, I put up a sheet of aluminum foil over the little bedroom window that faces east over the Nile and the cityscape of Cairo, and which also happens to overlook my bed. The early rising sun would peek through at an unseemly hour, and even when I tossed and turned on the mattress trying to escape its indomitable march into my sleep time, the ferocity of its rays warmed the room to an uncomfortable temperature that was impossible to sleep through.

Over months, crinkles, wrinkles, then hairline cracks began to appear in my window cover. In the mornings golden flecks began to glimmer along the aluminum faultlines. Soon tiny holes punctuated the steely gray, sun freckles flowed through onto my pillow, the headrest, lights of something divinely alive behind the tattered thin but tenacious metal curtain.

And when a starry burst of morning strays over my yet half-sleeping eyes, in dim musings I consider that behind the world I choose to see, is another more glorious light-filled world to which I am somehow tied inextricably but am unwilling or unable to behold other than through the cracks in those fragile barriers that anchor me to the finite spaces of the familiar.

Uneasy Alliances

I step out of my taxi in front of Cairo International. We have arrived in record time, aided by the earliness of the hour and the big Eid holiday, which together conspired against the perpetual Cairene traffic to make for empty streets and uncannily clear blue skies. Fortunate for me. I needed the help, having been betrayed by a negligent alarm clock (surely it had turned itself off of its own accord) and woken up 45 minutes later than originally planned. 15 minutes to stow some last minute items into a carry-on and personal item, eat something that passes for breakfast, and be out the door.

Ok, 20 minutes.

And wash the dishes I had eaten my breakfast on, and brush my teeth?

25 minutes.

And then the damn elevator always takes forever.

So when I flagged down a cab from among the smattering of vehicles on the road at seven fifteen on a big holiday morning, and he did not immediately challenge me to state what might constitute appropriate fare but rather sped along airport-bound post haste, needless to say I counted myself in the good graces of whatever diety (from among the agnostic’s pantheon of deities) doles out the fates of travelers.

My good cheer was of such tenacity that I happily turned the other way when my taxi driver stopped along the way to fill up on gas (in Cairo, a common enough thing to do in the middle of taxi-ing passengers from point A to point B).

So finally as I step out of my taxi into a brisk wind under clear skies, I happily overpay the taxi driver by ten pounds, wish him happy holidays, and then stride purposefully into the terminal. I take one step in, and have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve been dropped off at the wrong terminal.

I must have exuded uncertainty, because at that moment someone comes up and asked me, “Excuse me, where are you going? Let me see your ticket.”

He is dressed in a dark heavy vest and sharp khaki trousers, so that without close inspection they give the impression of official attire.

“Um, to New York?” I hand him my printed itinerary.

“Wrong Terminal.”

A vague sinking feeling in my stomach sets in. The two terminals are an unseemly distance apart, perhaps thirty minutes worth of walking, and I have no idea if there's official airport transportation between the two. “Ok, no problem. I can take a taxi to the other terminal,” I say to him in Arabic.

“Hmm… take a taxi you say” he mutters as if to himself, “Come with me please.”

I hesitate a split second.

“Come on, come on!” he says.

I follow him back outside, across the street to the parking lot. We pass up several waiting taxi drivers, and the sinking feeling in my stomach is now somewhere in the vicinity of my feet. My itinerary still in hand, he gets into the driver’s seat of an empty cab, I obligingly follow waiting to be willingly scammed.

We drive about two minutes, just long enough to be really inconveniently far from any terminal, when he stops the car.

“Listen, how much will you pay? Because normally it is one hundred pounds.”

“One hundred pounds? Noooo. That is a lot! Twenty pounds.”

“Ok, fifty pounds.”

“Ohh, to great sorrow, I only have twenty pounds.”

I am lying and he probably knows it.

“Twenty pounds?! Twenty pounds how?”

“Twenty is a lot, my friend. I would normally pay no more than five pounds for the distance you are driving me, or even four!”

“Oh, but this is not normal. Let me tell you. Fifteen pounds for the ticket to park at Terminal 1, and then another fifteen for the other terminal, that is thirty pounds!”

“And also you want me to pay twenty just to drive from here to there? It’s all in the same airport! Am I right or what?”

“Yes, yes, it’s the same airport, but what else will you do?”

“Enough! I will just walk there.”

“No, there’s not enough time!”

“I don’t care. I will walk, it’s not far.”

“No, no, walking’s no good, it’s not allowed.”

But whether to forestall the threat of my hand on the passenger side door handle, or to improve his bargaining position, my unlikely companion starts the car again, and resumes the drive between terminals.

“Who ARE you anyways?” I ask, hoping to improve my own position.

“Me? I am an airport worker.”

I scoff. “You work at the airport? But what is this? You drive a private taxi just like any other taxicab driver. No, you are just a normal taxicab driver who was waiting at the airport to cheat people.”

“No, seriously, I am a worker at the airport. Here, you want to see evidence?”

“Yeah, let me see this evidence.”

“Here, here, take this, look, you read Arabic?”

“Of course I read Arabic.”

“There, my ID card, what does it say? See, where does it say I work?”

I take it in hand and scan it a moment.

“It says you work for the Egyptian Department of Security.”

“See? See? I told you.”

“But what does the Department of Security have to do with the airport? Nothing, there is not relationship at all between the airport and the Department of Security. It should say ‘airport’ or ‘transportation’ or something.”

“No, no, that’s what I was trying to tell you.”

“What?”

“That I used to be a police officer.”

“What does that mean? That, also there is no relationship with anything!”

A brief silence reigns. Each of us withdraw to consider how we made out during that skirmish. I think I may have pulled slightly ahead, but not enough to considerably decrease my fare without putting up a big fight.

Boy I’m tired. This is not the way to begin 33 hours worth of flights, layovers, and one night fitfully sleeping in an LAX terminal.

I make a decision contrary to the principles of a foreigner living in Egypt and trying to pose as something more than just another tourist.

“Tell you what,” I interrupt the silence. “If the terminal is the right one, and I will go ask someone at the terminal if it is…”

“You want to ask someone at the terminal if it is the right place? No problem.”

“I will ask someone that I choose, and if they say it’s the right place, I will pay you fifty.”

He takes that in for a moment before responding:

“No, if it is the right terminal, you will pay one hundred.”

I start to see red and want to scream “if you are purportedly already taking me to the correct terminal why should I pay you MORE for not doubly cheating me and taking me to the incorrect one for God knows what disgusting money-making ruse.”

Of course, all that comes up against the language barrier, and my ability to speak Arabic is significantly worsened when I’m angry. Fortunate for me because in the second it takes me to collect myself, I realize he’s joking with me.

I laugh and slap him on the back. He chuckles with me. Neither of us makes mention of the fact that I am only supposed to have twenty on me. We all feel good about ourselves.

“But really. Fifty pounds only, right?”

Rather than enter the parking lot, he pulls up in the lane in front of the terminal to drop me off. A nearby police officer shouts at him, “Hey, you can’t park there!”

My wily companion steps over to soothe the airport guard. As I take advantage of the momentary confusion to move towards the terminal and verify that it is indeed the right one, I notice that a second police officer has intervened on my friend’s behalf—apparently the two of them are somewhat aquainted with one another, likely through a series of similar encounters whereby no doubt a bribe is handed over for the officer’s forbearance.

I make it inside, a few steps ahead of my apprehensive taxicab driver who doesn’t want his fish to escape once he’s gone through all the trouble to reel him in. One glance at the departures board is all it takes.

“Alright, you were right, this is the place.”

“Great.”

“So, here you go.” I pull a bill out of my wallet.

“Oh, you want to pay a hundred?”

“No, I pay you fifty. Do you have change for a hundred?”

“Noo, there is no change.”

“Well, that’s ok, we’ll find change somewhere here.”

Meanwhile the police officer has started yelling at him again.

“Please hurry up.”

Out of a vengeful sense of having been unduly cheated, or maybe a petty sense of cruelty, I staidly march across the terminal floor.

“Excuse me sir, do you have change? For a hundred? No? Ok thank you. Excuse me, Madam, do you have change? Oh, no? Ok, thank you anyways, thank you very... very... much........... alot.”

“Hurry, Hurry, faster!”

“Well, I need change first.”

“Ok, ok, I will make change. Here, give it to me.”

I hand it over to him.

“Wait! You still have my ticket. Give it to me first.”

He hands me back my itinerary and then rapidly rushes about the terminal, shouting:

“Change? Change? Change for a hundred?”

He zooms about, a wild zig-zag on the hunt for two fifties, ten tens, four twenties and two tens, anything to sum up to a hundred in a country chronically suffering from a shortage of exact change.

I of course zoom around right behind him, a little shadow intent on getting my rightfully owed change.

Somehow in the course of this mayhem he picks up, and bargains with a second passenger who is looking for a ride from the airport back into Cairo. Then we, all three of us, end up back outside and he is asking the shouting police officer if he would just give him a hundred pounds worth of change so he could be on his way and wouldn’t violate parking codes if only he could just get correct change, because the foreigner won’t let him go until…

And whether it’s a miracle, or merely because of a mutual interest in having the offending taxicab be on its way, the police officer starts counting out small change in tens, fives, and, at the last, in ones.

I see my taxicab driver slip the officer a ten into his breast pocket. Then he comes over to me, pausing only to settle his new passenger into the cab, and rapidly flip-counts through the change from the officer.

“Five, ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-five, fourty, fifty. Ok?”

I must have looked skeptical.

“Five, ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-five, fourty, fifty. Fine?”

Whatever. At the least I expect him to short me five, for half of the bribe used to pay off the guard.

“Ok, you cheater,” I say, trying to sound good-natured rather than resentful.

He gives me a half grin, like he’s not sure if I’ve been genuinely offended or if it’s all within the expected limits of the unspoken agreement between Egyptians and foreigners who are in the know.

I give him another slap on the back and tell him thanks.

It’s an odd set of uneasy alliances. What can the Egyptian do? If he says, look I need the money and it doesn’t make much of a difference to you, can the foreigner then be relied upon, out of good faith or generosity, to simply accept paying more than is normal, and/or would he in doing so be made to feel no better than a beggar? As for the foreigner, if he says, I don’t know the prices or the system, and I know the money means more to you than to me so I just want to pay something reasonable, will he then trust the Egyptian not to overcharge him outrageously, and/or will he become no more than a fool to be taken advantage of? Thus, instead we play out our little prearranged theater: the one as if he were merely the average affronted customer demanding only his due in fair prices; the other as if he were only charging the natural costs of services rendered; each party’s respective dignity, or at least the appearance of it, maintained in the fragile web of self-apparent lies and transparent dissemblances.

A check-in counter and several security and customs checkpoints later, in the sterile tourist-friendly safety of the inner terminal, I slouch into a bench, and await my flight. Though the battle is long over, I am bitten by an idle curiosity to know the final score.

I dip my hand into my coat pocket and draw out a wad of discolored bills of varying denominations.

Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty…

I stick the money back into my pocket, hold back a laugh, and grin into space.

He shorted me ten.

The scamp.

NEW POEMS

I assume no one really checks this anymore, and I have e-mailed some of these out to various people just because the urge to share is too strong to resist. Still... I figured... just in case.

Three new poems written this October/early November while in Cairo.

All the forward thinking is mired in the past these days.

I sleep with the balcony door open. The chill clenches my feet, their dirty bottoms, the extra thick layers of skin. Tendrils of wind brush the corners of my elbow, work their way up to tease my face. Cold is so primordial.
Hunter-gatherers laid out on the forest floor, bedding in pine needles and mulch, or animal skins, or tents—I don’t know. Or maybe it was the times I went camping, and at night there was nothing between me and the dead of space save for paper thin layers of sky: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.
I am recalled to the lolling tongue of the laughing wolf in his winter coat. The dull heatless throb of a granite cliff’s heart. The snap of ice crystals and frozen autumn morning dew, tread underfoot. Wild things that scorn us in their insentience.
And I am curled up on my white linen mattress cover, while an open balcony door whispers to me of forgotten heritage.

Wonderment, we say, because awe is filled with a question; no certainties will come of it, and therein is despair.

At times there comes a deluge
as a quarrel, an epiphany, a small failure, a piercing dream,
a sweeping off of things, really.
And a fierce loneliness
that quiet days peaks out from the loose sod
in little catches of startling truth
overtakes me those rare days of tempest trials.
And I am face to face with my bare self
quivering on the threshold.

Oh I envy the naivety of my bedroom curtains
that flap in the immaculate cold of the morning
sighing in and out, languid flashes of light and color
from within the folds of humble coarse fabric.
What cause for such carefree abandon
such unaffected freedom
when it hangs by its feet, crucified to the wall
by a vulgar line of thin metal tracking
that proclaims the upper and lower limits
of its trite oscillations
breathing in and out
two meters’ distance
of an immaculate winter’s morning.

EL-EIN CAMP

The Rooster
when he is torn
from his midnight sleep
crows
like bereavement
an unnatural dawn
in a scream
without light;

and above the lemon trees
in our terrace orchard
the kohl-blue sky
and immense fuschia clouds
go racing
fast
hastening
so fast
until uncaring eternity.

--2:40 am Monday Aug. 6, 2007, Nablus

Sometimes when I conceptualize of the world I populate it with imaginary people. I give them personalities, dreams, troubles big and small, beliefs, lives unfathomable until they defy the very imagination that created them. I am convinced that the real world is just as such, and as I behold it I am filled with strange feelings of longing, sadness and love.