Gaza

As a child I had a toy rifle, an impotent half-length weapon that triggered only imagination: days of The Wild Wild West, of Gunsmoke, of The Rifleman. I would sometimes stand alone in my bedroom, casually poised before a mirrored enemy, and would raise the rifle up, quickly, cocking the loop lever and firing just the way Chuck Connors did in all those nineteen-inch reruns. Only from mine there was no recoil nor puff of smoke: just the simple click, a sound that reminds a small middle-class American boy that violence is merely amusement. Yet not so, not everywhere.

Every child questions the rain
wonders what it means, where it comes from--
“Those are God’s tears,” we’re told,
(though never wondering at the sadness that
makes
God
cry).

A rite, these tears: like abandoning the breast
or walking to school alone
or staying out late with the third-most beautiful girl you know.

A rite: like any other circumcision that reminds
you of what you are in ways not always pleasant.

And halfway around our world
children live
who cannot walk to school
or stay out late
(though they do leave home, and may again tomorrow).

Surrounded by killer angels
we struggle to understand how people can revere the same history,
claim the same home,
disbelieve the others’ same God;
how people can revisit Abel’s Cain mutiny with such cyclicality
And such—yes—reverence.
(It is the only word, after all, which justifies.)

Those truly embattled are those who
do not yet understand siege,
or enemy
or amputate
Who have not yet been taught to hate.
A rock is a rock to them;
a stone, a stone:
something over which small feet stumble when running for mothers.

Those truly embattled only understand
the visceral knife-stab of fear.
For the rest, there are no sharp edges,
no clean blades,
nothing to measure success or failure.
Only body counts until the next time
wizened and shattered men pretend détente when
all that is happening
is a re-arming respite
while, in the meantime, these children as well will
come to question the rain and will be told:
“Those are God’s tears.”

But there, just there, a child asks, too:
“Then what is the thunder, omma, and what is the lightning?”