prayer for my people

I feel your tight belly in mine,
your knotted jaw
the stone skip of your eyes over drawn shoulders 
waiting for a crescendo of endings 
to return like winter 
to rip everything you know 
from your flattened palms 

I feel your story 
running circles like horse races 
across your labored heart
chanting the inevitable 

the last time some of us let ourselves believe we were home
let ourselves believe we’d convinced our tormentors we are human
enough to deserve our lives, we were wrong

so some of us hitched our only hope on sheltering white knuckles 
around the promise of a bullet

and like a young girl with too shattered trust, who can not see each sticky-sweet 
promise of protection intends her bruised and empty on a street corner

we can not see the teeth, offering us a hand of rescue

this was not our idea
we only wanted to be safe 
to be ourselves
to heal

my Zeida was born on a farm in Pidvolochys'k, Poland in 1911
in 1925 he joined a socialist Zionist youth group,
in 45 he joined the endless snaking line in the displaced persons camp in Zelsheim beside his only living relative 
in 48 he first walked the streets of north Philly to his factory job, in 2002 he died refusing to place his soles on Israeli soil
refusing to let a counterfeit dream purchase his hatred of Palestinians, his entitlement to land they had always known, his inability to see himself in their cries of loss

he knew this was not his Zion 

the hardest thing is to realize we’ve fallen again, for shouldering a crusade against the threat of brown skin and an unbroken love of land, for wearing the skin of someone else’s blame 

the hardest thing to do with the trigger side of a gun is to lay it down
to consider there is mercy out there for us
when we have dispossessed our own 

the hardest thing is to seek home in the arms of our people, in not knowing together 
what the answer is, but promising to not become our own enemy