if you try to remember Gaza before, a place you know only from war
the memory plays like a grainy filmstrip, unspooling and melting
into messy amnesia
and so you might assume Gaza has forever been a litter of stone
every surface graveled with boulders diminished to
mineral pebble ash
you might think, from all the gray matter of image and imagining
that this is history, geology – eons upon eons of rubble
the quarry remains of continental drift, Precambrian pitch and stone
which might, since you’re digging deep, remind you of tectonic plates,
conjuring thoughts of safekeeping – granite-hewn walls scarred
by siege and season, flinty riprap, David’s slingshot
all these come to mind, but depth of defense only goes so far
and even through the blur of avoidance, you know, don’t you?
that Gaza is wound, not weapon, the gritty grinding of lives
bone breath dust
and you know, or hear, or learn – before gray there was color
olive grove green, indigo blue, mosque white ablaze in morning sun
but shells fall from sky, pound earth, destroy pigment and pulse
homes and hope, and you know, don’t you?
these ruins aren’t relics of faulty memory – they hold centuries
of grief – the wailing of mothers, the exhale of earth
and the silence of fathers digging for children beneath
Gaza stone
