Sunflowers for me, a life in Cambodia for you

I want to honour the dead
the dead children
the dead poets in each of them
who will never be alive to taste
this moment
Moment becomes memory
I think of a man
who brought me an ending
made of hot sun and Derek Walcott
boiled potatoes and soup, the sea and the
knowing eyes of David Foster Wallace
a peanut butter sandwich, wildflowers
tents flapping in the breeze of a refugee
camp
fragile objects, grief that seemed
to nourish my mind
I found the way in, the way out
in a closed medicine cabinet
an orchard filled of olive trees
unripened watermelon
tea, sugar biscuits
and an Anna Akhmatova poem
You're dancing
with your love in the
autumn rain
There's no open window to relationship
in my life anymore
I remain demanding,
fixated upon the vulnerable, I'm angry
I'm grieving
Just like Palestine
Demanding the right to live, to
human rights,
vulnerable, angry about this conflict,
this war, this genocide
I have no shoes
just like this dead body
It is the body of a child
I walk barefoot
from my room to the bathroom
What does that feel like?
The memory of you?
The memory of Palestine
Life seeping into the hot sun
Palestine seeping into the hot sun
What does that feel like?
To taste the salt on your skin for an eternity
I inhale, war, bombs
Air strikes are like flowers
Even thorns demand to be acknowledged
Even thorns are bittersweet
I exhale, need
spiritual hunger
a film, Romeo and Juliet, by
Franco Zeffirelli
What happens to love in war
Are there sonnets
What sustains the brave
I watch the trailer for the film The Hours
and I write this poem from the core
of my being, I eat marrow, tissue, lung and
what's left is my soul, my sore throat,
these tears
I become another woman with a different
kind of suffering and knowledge, it rains
war from the sky. This is what I've
inherited, war. It is a bitter sun that sets.