Of Sirens

"Of Sirens" is a short story I wrote about a commute I took from Ramallah to Nablus, as the men headed out early that morning to their jobs and obligations, the sighs and empty glances filled the bus as news of another bombing of Gaza was announced on radio. Just weaving through the Israeli settlements that litter the ancient road, we were slicing the identity of Palestine over the rumble of an old engine just about ready to give out.

_____________ 

What strong men, who in news clips
Throw the earth's bullets at a raging
Monster made of clay
What strong men who—Face sucked dry
Cigarette chapped lips
Puffing cancerous industry into his
Hopes—cowboy, camel mockery
In menthol or 100s
Sons who scrape the roads
And humiliate the future mother
Of all they could come up with
All 365 shekels worth of Life.

Men whose hair is grey like
The thin streak that outlines
The moon
Waning away at every headline
The crevices cratering their jawline
Their eyes sunken in with clouds
Raining below lashes—and whips
Of hard times and hunger
Men who cave into that ridge
Of an eyebrow that is soon to collapse
By the stress of melting flesh too weak
From the bruising sun

_______________

I was late. I rushed from obligation to the bus where my friends awaited. They sat next to each other, and across the aisle was an aged man whose fist embraced the polished wood of his cane. I sat behind him and noticed he was speaking about my village. I looked at the man next to me, who sat sluggishly in his seat, looking out the window and staring at the concrete of the massive public transportation garage. We waited as more people piled in. It was mostly men, men who left every day at 9:00 to achieve some kind of bread for the night. A few foreigners sat towards the rear, their English accented by whatever colonial enterprise from which they were born.

I was born the Amercania. The Palestinian of the West.

I reclined in my chair, careful not to bump into the man next to me. And when I looked out the window I made it certain that it was obvious I was looking to the world, although I had seen these things repeatedly. 

We passed my neighborhood. The buildings piled in some kind of NGO wreckage, celebrated by the subsistence and dependency of my neighbors. We turned towards the older portion of my village. The salutations of my heart fell upon the old homes of ancestors in each blink of my eye.

We whipped onto Nablus Road and I saw the usual twenty year olds acting as police because they held guns. What or who they policed was beyond me, but I saw them there—every day in the same uniform, same stance, same crooked cap of a country yet to be recognized.

I had slept for only three hours the previous night. And when I did awake my belongings were in a fury: my passport misplaced, my money in the car, my documents for work scattered across the floor. I had caught this bus. But time I could not keep up with.

The windows became still frames, as they did in any moving vehicle. My eyes pieced them together to form a narrative. My silhouette was mirrored in the window, but it was a dark figure with no eyes or features. Just a shadow of me was drawn upon the landscape, blurring as identity usurped my experiences from beyond the bus. Who was I without my past, and what would I become at the end of this and every ride?

I began to daydream, and thought about my sandals. They were not adequate for running. I imagined gunshots, running in my colorful easy-to-target dress, and the black soul of my sandals bending behind the toes so that I had nothing to support me when I felt bare earth. I fell on my palms, saw myself look back, and before I resumed my imaginary flee, I realized the absurdity of my daydream while the arguing men on the bus disrupted the war of my imagination.

The old man in front me spoke his life story, his opinions, his beliefs: the narrative that he knew that shadowed all Palestinian narratives. And the blue eyed senior, 9th grade educated man in front of him contested. He spoke his history as if it were some cream, some special touch to the recipe of saturated politics that baked in the summer sun. And then the man across from him added the dashes, the special touches of a chef known for his mastery of this particular bite in Palestinian perseverance.

_______________

What strong men who
Slump over their carts and chant
Their items for sale for ten years
Or fifteen or whenever the last treaty
Burst balloons of aid upon their shoulders
Like rain, while their fields died into dirt and garbage

What strong, robust, handsome men
Who pollinate cemented symbols
Of twisted animals in rage
With car exhaust and hopes of
Finding her, who ignores him and shudders
At their raping stare
 

Secure men who walk aimlessly
Yell in traffic while spraying cologne
Honking horns, waving arms
Proclamations of false entrepreneurship

What strong, rigid, tenacious men
Who retire every night in debt.
Who speak threats without much weaponry
Besides the image of his father hanging on the wall
By a nail drilled into the carved rocks of time
His history is his Jesus
Crucified
He was born by way of
Feminine holiness

_______________

These people were cooking and being cooked. We were all a giant feast to the appetite of something grand and frightening. And as the man next to me began to mutter his reaction to it all, the rest grew quiet.  The recipe to victimization was ready on the table and he had spoken to late. The kitchen timer was ringing and the good were already out of the oven.

Sirens sounded from behind the bus, but no one heard them at first. No one saw flashing red except for in their minds when we heard the radio. We noticed the bus driver slow down as he pulled off to the right. We were all rushing towards something, but circumstance would determine who we were as the kitchen timer roared from the rear. 

We weaved between illegal, colonial settlements that tasted us. Tasted our flesh, our flavor of survival. Their craving for olive oiled, shimmering skin of people slowly frying in their own sweat—this was the appetite of men and women who lived atop lofty hills.

People died. The man next to me clicked his tongue in Arab dissatisfaction. 

I saw myself in the window again and listened to the dry voice of the radio mutter mechanical information to us as we sat. The driver continued to slow down, and as the engine grumbled we made out a few words. 

Gaza.

Aid.

Death.

Injury.

The ambulance sirens were too loud now, and the news faded from us. The ambulance raged onto the lane for oncoming traffic and threw itself in front of us. 

22 humanitarian aid workers killed, Gaza. Sirens.

Numbers on the rise, Gaza.

Injuries, Gaza. Sirens.

Death. Quiet.

The man next to me clicked his tongue again.

The red light of the ambulance hardly separated itself from the light of the sun—the same light that was blinding, shedding truth, burning, fueling, or fading. They had their own emergency on that ambulance. They had their own kind of time. 

Perspective is an issue of how our eyes capture and withhold. My eyes were in my ears then, as our stomachs sank at every bump in the road, my hands limp at my side, my mouth with no language but remorse. 

He clicked his tongue again. Dissatisfaction can be mechanical.

We were slowing down once more, and a man from the rear indicated that he wanted to be dropped off. We were stopped by young Israeli soldiers, who waved us forward through the checkpoint. Then the man from the rear got off. I heard the man next to me click his tongue again. It was as if he were casually searching online for some trace of human feeling in an electronic survey of us. It was quiet again as he paused, scanning the screen for information, and then another click from his mouth. It was that lack of content that had each of us vigorously clicking for more windows to open, more information to possibly get us there faster.

Yet no one knew where that was exactly.

______________

Absent in a world
Whose men carry two different cell phones
Because no one is calling them and when they
Hear their love song ringing they sit and
Let it play to serenade those lonely souls
Who wish they could converse over rhythm

With someone besides the ugly wife
Who wants a quart of milk and
Food
Food for her children
Oh what strong men!
Who eat bread and honey for dessert

_______________

It was not the news that was upsetting this man. No new statistic. No fact of who was hurt. It was what this story made of him, the poetry that clicked in his head, and the siren that had made him numb to catastrophe.

 ______________

Who beat metal structure into buildings standing empty
But glorious, so glorious
That he will point to what he chiseled in that million dollar
Complex funded by some agency initialed with manipulation

He built it and sweat in the summer.
His pride to be used
He hangs his degrees from Europe upon
His teal painted office full of sickness and no cure
His pride to be foreign
He flashes his weapon empty of bullets,
Because at least he has the phantom of what kills
His own people

_______________

What side did death have except one? Commercials were airing now between facts. Like the metal separating each window frame on the bus, the commercials provided some support and framework to make the broadcast possible. News and suffering was always an industry here. Gaps existed intentionally, and chains linked us all together.

People call this the peace process.

He clicked his tongue.

He needed his own time, his own vehicle, his own place. Too much separated him from completion.

As we sped up his discontent stopped. And finally he pressed the button above us to indicate he had arrived to his day commitment, clicked his tongue one last time to get off the bus, and disappeared into the Occupation.

And it was then I realized the kitchen timer had been ringing for decades. My people were overcooked and just moving between the hands of predators who continued to push the plates away from their sight in disgust. They were unable to decide what it was they will do with the creation of me, of him, of sirens, of an agenda rotting and moldy—their only cultivated food for their survival.

  ______________

Strong, strong men

Who weep at the sight of

A bird that can no longer sing because

Its cage has killed it

Cry because they could not make it

To see their child born on the floor

Of his grandfather's home

Where he too was born into this

Place with infertile fruits decaying

At the mouth of a monstrous barrier

Cry to see a cycle repeat their gruesome

Existence

What strong men,

To see their landscape conform to their life

A landscape dying

Absent of water and so

They bleed life into it

Breathe more Death through its rose lips

So that when it exhales

It reappears from purgatory

And proclaims to Heaven

Buzzing with jets

And military campaigns

A Landscape Dying

That it is fighting until the final breath

Of its strong, feeble men