Tonight
My daughter coaxes a melody from my father
Asks him sweetly,
“will you sing for me? I want to dance”
And for an hour or so
He picks his way through all the favorite family melodies
Refrains of his fathers and grandmothers overflow from our kauhale
My daughter dawns her dancing dress
Long flowing fabric stitched with flowers
She smiles as the tassels twirl around her
And the rest of us sit present simply enjoying this little miracle of a human
And just as I begin to settle in
my heart is pulled out of my chest
the breath that holds the heirloom tune
gets caught in the cracks at the back of my throat
Because I know
As I watch my daughter dance
somewhere distant in miles but ever close in spirit
Another child takes her last breath
at the very moment that my wife fastens the gown upon our daughter
Another mother wraps a shroud around her beloved
while my daughter twirls her free body through our livingroom
Another child lays still between the crumbling walls of what was once a home, hospital, school…
As my father animates an ancestral serenade
Another grandfather cries out a scream of horror
Each moment of our joyous love here
Paired with its own twin terror behind the mirror
I have no conception of how we could have allowed
A world quite like this to exist
Where somewhere thousands of miles away and yet close all the same
A beautiful Palestinian child could be dancing
while her grandfather sings a song written long before the birth of our occupiers
But instead
Both precious beloveds are martyred
and with them
another family wiped from the civil registry
and with them
another universe foreclosed from possibility
I sit split in half
at the boarder of these two realities
at the margins of these overlapping worlds
They are both mine
To know
and to hold
I dare not look away
A single tear runs down my face
Without a word the sweet child in my livingroom takes notice
Momma? Don’t cry, it’s time to dance
And so we do.
