pieces ( after Human Flow) working on this!.

i.  

they arrived in the village on foot, by the hundreds.

they arrived unwanted, dragging a child or an elder,

a sack of belongings.  it was in fact a lovely place:  green

mountains, little black goats on the hillside, onions, potatoes

ready to harvest, and a river too wild to cross, almost

dragging them under,  against the chain of hands and

arms.  it must have been autumn by then, padded

jackets squirting clear water, weight for the crossing.

that was after the bombings, but before the camps,

and  before they saw the fire-colored horse, its slow

circular gallop, its  sweaty flanks, its eye toward

freedom

ii.

escape by water must be the hardest.

we take our walk along the coast, doing a shoot of

abandoned boats.  that one belonged to a fisherman. can't  you

see the pieces of net, the scales, the skeletal fish, dried

under tongues of sun?  this is almost the tropics.  wooden

boards losing their red, their green, but we find a ski

 boat in white and acqua, in fading plastic drifting from

 some other port, some high rise shoreline .  no one would
come here by high sea,  skimming the waves in absolute darkness,

fearing a storm or a mother birthing in a cabin with nothing
 but elbow room, and one last gulp of fresh water.

and that makes part of the story:  pirates centuries gone,

a coastguard expecting no surprises, a sleeping village

that could be awoken to plunge into the  low tide, pull out

the feverish, offer  the hands of a midwife

iii

to return to an abandoned city:

the women scavenge the ruins,

then shoulder the desperate tasks

of washing  the fluid-stained walls,

covering what is left of windows,

sweeping, stacking, or mending

the anything that  can be put back

together. a lone cow walks

 the streets, her bell ringing,

 her udder full.  war has been

 the business of men,  the work
 of memory for somebody's

children.

iv.

three Palestinian girls have gone to the beach.

there is in each, some deep harbor of hope: to where

can the boats carry them, each night  on the edge

of desire, where checkpoints and gruff soldiers  blur

into waves and sunsets,  or a midnight café where

music churns out onto the drizzle of streets and

dancing?  a tiger has gained his temporary

 freedom,  his non native savannah.  today all rests

in the hands of the men,  yet they are bound to

to the borders, the barring and the burning.  to

imagine is to excavate in depleted fields,  to unearth

all we have done to destroy

ourselves.