Return to Left Curve no. 26 Table of Contents
( Ed.Note: The poems published here are our selections from the twenty poems which comprise this work.)
Plastic Flowers in Paradise
by
Philip Hyams
PLASTIC FLOWERS IN PARADISE
I.
Plastic flowers propped up,
Standing in brass cartridge casings
Of former anti-tank shells.
The war is over Mohammed.
Its paraplegic losers roll back
towards their homes,
Twisted limbs and cutout hearts,
Twisted limbs and broken bones.
Black-masked steel,
Who is the mightier power?
Arab eyes?
Jew noses?
Who bleeds the history books?
Who paints their own people
In black oils?
Is this field mined?
Will this tree grow?
II.
"The car blew up over there."
He points at a charred stone wall.
"They came during the night in rubber dinghies."
She points towards a bullet-riddled villa.
My bones, your bones.
My brother, your son.
My son, your brother.
The war is over Ilan.
Your son is born into a world
Of blue ocean and sun and sea
And green orchards
And death
And death
And murder
And defense
And justice
And injustice
Your justice
Their suffering
Their justice
Your suffering
My justice.
III.
Jericho Oh Jericho has no more walls.
Jericho dry Jericho has no more tears.
No more tears to shed.
No more Psalms to sing.
No more graves to rob.
The Lebanon Oh sweet cedar scent
Burns and hands reach out from
The rubble, bubble, rubble, bubble
Bubble barrel oil.
In the West all is best.
Their B-52s bring our nourishment
While the other’s Kalatchinakovs
Feed our children’s imaginations.
Abraham’s sons duel.
They smile at one another and show
Their teeth.
The Holy Land is riddled enough.
Mohammed take my hand
Our wheelchairs need oiling.
MEA SHEARIM
Who are you who prolong
This agony?
With your black flying-saucer hat
You skim our people’s history.
Daubed on a wall of Jerusalem stone:
"Zionism is diametrically opposed to
Judaism."
So what are you doing here?
You are the three percent suffering.
You are the conscience of the obsolete.
You are the victim of dogma and
The slave of belief.
May the ghetto burn like
A dry bale of hay
And may its fumes blow forever,
Forever, faraway.
The shadow Jews of Mea Shearim
only used to pray.
Now they dictate.
FRATRICIDE
My Arab brother
I now fast your Ramadan
Because it was I
Who fed that big gun
Which took your life
And your blood mixed with
Our earth
Your woman tore her hair
While mine clutched me to her
In the night
I was your life
My woman your wife
Your children chose darkness
To become our conscience
Our people commit fratricide
And our fathers sow the seeds
Of future Shivas
How do we cut that tie
When we terminate a life?
The palms wear rings
Rings for each war
Rings for each body
Each boy we lose becomes
Some sort of unlucky Issac
And Ishmael we are given
No choice
We have no voice
We are only actors in History’s
Nightmare
My Arab brother
We who both know Abraham
Let us throw down our knives
In exchange for the plow’s blade
The spilled blood from the past
Can only fertilize
SETTLING FOR STONE
Settling for stone
For stone to hold us safe and warm
When the elements are unfriendly
For stone to weight us beneath the ground
While our physical bodies shrivel away
For stone to let our aggression out with
When words and eyes cannot persuade
Our enemies to go off in peace
(But those enemies are ourselves
Just as they are our friends)
Stone
Stone
Stone
Settling for stone
To build our hearts in granite coffins
While we pave false truths over our souls
Settling for stone
WE ARE ALL REFUGEES
The washed shutters in pearl blues
Stand half-open revealing eyes of
Darkened rooms.
Its holder: a house built from stone
Sitting high on four pillars upon
The edge of an ageless Semitic hill.
Empty, empty, they are all gone.
Everything was found intact,
Even the dishes left in the rack.
Did they really hope to come back?
What prophecies did they believe?
Oh those poor children, how they were
Deceived!
Their intended victims were not.
Their conscience only now begins to bleed
In hate against those dreams which were
Promised but never came
True, true.
What is truth?
Only a different lie for you
Than it is for me.
What is an Arab?
What is a Jew?
Only brothers who have been torn in two.
Their father was Abraham,
Not the Muslim, not the Jew!
And now empty houses with window shutters
Painted for Allah’s eyes alone, await patiently,
Wait, wait.
Wait to the wars are over
And the final judgments have been made.
Magog and Gog are knocking upon their
Doors.
We are all refugees.
Philip Hyams is an Israeli/Canadian poet, novelist and artist currently living in Kfar Sava, Israel.His poetry has been published in more than 50 journals around the world. He has also been a documentary film producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
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