Poetry

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spirit
with a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,
and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.

The shadows creep across the lawn

In the silence of the afternoon.

A tiny wood raft was afloat
on the cold gray sea
of the cellar floor […]

appear overnight in the white gauze
soaking up her wound.

Mahmoud Darwish was the most important Palestinian poet of our time. He was born in 1942 in the Western Galilee in the village of Birweh, before it was razed in the 1948 war that would lead to Israeli independence. As a young man, Darwish...

Pubic tufts, thyme & moss, are greening
 again in the clefts of the wall

latticed by the first flails of warm, late winter,
 and so she removes her shirt