They will evict me from existence because I sided with the void.

  They will evict me from the void because I am suspect of containing existence.

Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish.

In my dreams,
what is to come
and what has passed
are brothers,
like Cain and Abel,
indistinguishable,
until one swallows the other

In my dreams,
it is always the same;
I am trying to rewrite
Beit Lehem, 1
house of bread,
so that it reads
Bayt Lahm 2
home of meat

I am always trying to tell you
that the land is empty
and all its people are exiled
and you must know that
the exiles never look back 3
and they tear off their limbs
to pass through 4

I may tell you that this is only
the land of memory
and cold flesh,
but that isn’t the truth

It was also the land
of freedom and fishnets,

The refuge of a kind boy
from Al Nasirah, 5
whose skin glowed red 6
like a bitten tongue,
or maybe a torn limb,

until bread swallowed meat,
the way Cain swallowed Abel,
and tomorrow
will swallow today

In my dreams,
there always comes a sea
of boys with tongue-red skin
flooding the city,
and, many times,
I have tried to build a dam,
and I have begged them to stop,

but you must know
the boys of بيت لحم
are amputees
with incurable hemophilia 7
they think dam 8 can only mean blood;
they bleed and they bleed

It is always the same

I try to feed them
but their bellies
are never full
so I try to starve them
but they are fed
with something else
then I try to kill them
and they are still alive

In the end I crawl
underneath the rubble
next to many bodies
until I find Solomon’s
I wake him and ask him
to tell me the story again 9
of how he learned
that everything had a hunger
so he held a feast,
saying to everything,
eat and be full,

but some of everything
was in exile
so it scoffed at Solomon,
tore off its own limb
to pass through,
and never became whole