a country of 3adi, normal

Adi', is the way we spell normal
like it doesn't hurt to breathe at times
Adi' is the longest wait before going home
not because the traffic is hell but because
the sea of cars isn't moving. Adi, is the youth
wasting hours of their lives struggling to be
clearheaded enough to take a jump. Adi, is a country of normal
where everything and anything is of itself a story
Adi, is the country where death walks hand in hand
with life, like an old bride and a groom.
Adi is the abnormality, of getting used to normal.

going back home

I am finally back 

you write to me 

I slip between sleep 

and waking to ask you 

what has been the most apparent 

difference you've seen over 

my body, the trees or the clear skies 

I hear you say 

the air, its different

smells like my childhood and your perfume. 

olive picking

Three on the floor
legs between buckets and century old trees
olives pitted and non pitted
let down to earth with nimble hands

Aradi: Territories

Call it peasantry, the practice of hands turning the soil for air
dirt capsulated under fingernails:
a primal attachment that keeps you standing

gone is the old wind trapped under earth
leaving a new face out sunning
the arriving faces, like soil and oxen, turn over these small pieces of ground

Read the rest here: https://crevice.ro/a-game-of-hands-rock-paper-scissors/ 

Peace with a native tongue

The horse in me stopped fighting
for a greener pasture
made peace with the rye around because it was always home.

a battle against tongues

I feel like I am running a battle against tongues
one my mother gave me that contains
enough expressions to make possible, life
with the others I have gained along the way

collecting like star-dust
meaning, word after word to make sense
of other ways to say the same things
but with gentleness, with vigor, with insanity

I feel like I am running a battle against tongues
that get out of the way when I love
because I lose language in seconds
before I fall

stammering at my basic ABCs
that are replaced by music,
butterflies and somber lyrics
one I call softness

I feel like I am running a battle against tongues
as one leaps to the front at the very minute I push it backwards
biting down on sailor language, wrong adjectives
in fear of the sharp blade it has

making peace in a battle is impossible
but living like siblings has proved a good use
for you cannot hate on your own blood
even if it flows through different veins.

citywide

I have been thinking about this word for three days now
how can something be wide as the city

yet small enough to contain a sack of old marbles
crossing the pit where they were thrown

I have been thinking about this word for three days now
how a thing can multiply and find itself similar

in cities that wear different capes, husky
brawling, windy or plain desert like

I have seen people describe cities
like they would a lover

with soft eyes, with skin for stones
but I have seen cities eroding people

like lime to acid
like our city to our heads

this is a citywide gathering
for town-wide hearts.

an east wind in summer

standard summertime
an east wind blows my way
it's only an hour's timezone difference

with driftwood

We drift, each talking at a higher wavelength
call this another form of love
I call it another form of painting with blood
we call this a family swayed with driftwood

human formation

today I saw with my own eyes
how a human is formed

tiny dot, black in a black space
that falls into a void

tiny dot in a black sack
will arrive with a stork

when we stop waiting.

a cold birthday

Eyes drooping with liner,

Cigarette at hand and her birthday was very cold

Spent moving between the rock and the harder place;

I haven’t been home- she thinks

Because home’s sunshine was the answer

it's calm

A thunderstorm beats around the edge of your balcony
it is calm, we say, this potential gathering of clouds

the wind blows eastward, taking with it leaves
shoots and dust, it is calm, a quiet noise around the house

it is summer and the streets are boiling
with a hint of those who have started to feel, it's calm

we speak of the sea that is high and infested
with jellyfish and human skins

it is calm, how we raise our heads to face mornings
that are full when they bend us in half

all is calm here, in the safest points of the mountain
where we overlook the sleepers and refuse to see

how calm turns us over in the head.

14

is the number of day
for the silence
that fills me when I watch the news

Going back

Going back, I find myself walking backwards to the sea

mixing fact and fiction, stirring tears in tea

going back, I dream of potential lives

various definitions of normalcy:

a radio playing a midnight love poem-

music to replace shrieks,

 stories about dancing bunnies

instead of departures for a child's memory

a piece of orange melting in my mouth

 abstracts beget less blossom in using the right verb

 even the church's bell isn't shy from chiming at mid-day

 I count family members and pray in silence

 use verbs like reduce, to tie my blessings together

that I have language,

 that I breath,

that I have stories

 but I know nothing is normal

and I know the verb return

 is a synonym for stay.

help

is the word we use most
because every day
we look for exits

on the brink

on the brink of an upcoming death

that swears to not sound so negative

we find ourselves talking about a life

that waits for the decisions of those granting us time

not God, not nature, but others who like us

think they are above nature, above an all-seeing-God

because they hover in their steel planes over the clouds above our cities

Acre, a fort

Strolling by the port
midweek, the sea is the same
strong like the fort it lives on its feet.

Haifa

We return, once more
to where we belonged,
after stealing an orange from a holy site.

Jerusalem, the heart

Eighteen times, built and destroyed

imagine the damage 

I have only once built 

one sandcastle then jumped on it 

imagine, seven doors 

open then another six waiting for Judgment Day

I have only once waited

for a letter of your judgment, never arriving 

imagine a bullet-hole in a metal door

marking the wars on the land

I have seen a war rage inside of me
on the seven doors of the city, where I walk and weep every day.

in a car with a stranger

- Which country held your body, the times your brain was working?
- Soils, with different twisted tongues: one for home, one for elsewhere
I pay my attention to the window, where the nose of the lady meets a setting sun

- The horizon is beautiful
there's a muffed silence in the car, like fog rising
from the dashboard onto the glass

- Why did you reverse your footsteps?
- in what sense is a return a reversal:
reversal denote eraser and who wants to erase their history?

- What is your direction of prayer?
- the same direction of the sun, Eastward,
not a key change if prayer is still kept as a habit

- You sound an awful lot like someone who....
- Got cut out from a rooted tree?
there's a muffed silence in the car, like fog rising

- where is home?
I look from the dashboard to the glass
I close my eyes.