Its time to dance

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. 

Rafah Burns as i hold my sleeping son

Rafah burns, and I hold my sleeping son

I look at the pictures 

Of children 

Their smiling faces torn from the bone 

Their laughter evacuated  

I watch the videos of burning tents, of flesh floating in the wind 

I watch them 

While I hold my sleeping son on my chest 

I feel something like rage 

Something like love 

Something like fear

And Shame 

And outrage 

but this feeling is all this and still something different 

Something far beyond my emotional vocabulary 

I am a poet without language 

An empath without root 

I am overflowing in something I do not recognize 

Something like terror

But still not quite that 

I am holding my sleeping son 

And a man I will never know

But love all the same 

Holds up an infant corpse  

His beautiful face 

Has been carried off with the last of our humanity 

Before I can catch myself I let out a wail 

And The sleeping baby in my arms jerks himself awake

And now he cries with me 

For Palestine 

For the uprooted olive trees

For the shelled hospitals & schools & homes 

For the thousands of children 

Their parents and loved ones martyred 

In a smoldering flame 

Their fathers who gather the severed limbs 

      Like flowers 

Mothers who catch their drifting ashes like      

       sand caught in a gust of terror

My son and I are here 

Under an occupation a whole world away 

The flames of Rafah smolder before us 

I can feel the heat crackling in my blood 

And so we — my son and I — 

     fill this silent world with our wails  

Both Feeling something we can’t quite name

For Palestine, and all the reasons a Cease Fire is not enough

 

In gaza 

There is no escaping the constant barrage of bullet and bombs 

There is no water

No food or No fuel

No electricity for hospitals desperately trying to care for their wounded 

no place to safely lay the bodies of their fallen 

no guarantee any will survive long enough to pray over and bury their dead

So Palestinian’s of all ages are posting last wishes and farewells on twitter, Instagram, queering the map

they say: they will not be pushed out of what little they have left

they say:  they wish to live long enough to fall in love

to bear children who grow old enough to bear and raise their own 

they tell us their names and their dreams, their secrets, and regrets

I read as many as I can until the blue light of my phone begins to blur my vison 

 

Hours later I am awoken to the sound of my daughter crying 

She has been shaken awake by the sound of military helicopters 

hovering over her bedroom

The buzz of the blades makes the crayons on her desk shiver 

The meaning is clear 

So long as American money and war planes can reach 

the very edge of this globe 

None of us are safe

I cover her in a faded pink blanket

My mind flases to the image of parents searching for their children 

under blood soaked sheets 

I shake like the crayons on the desk and press the image out of my mind

Say a prayer of pale over her body

Wisper in her ear, I am here my love 

You are not alone 

 

In the very moments that the edges of empire and its violence are expanding 

I hold my daughter against my chest 

Across the globe, Netanyahu and his war mongering friends drop 6,000 american missiles in a territory ¼ the size of our island 

Gaza clings to its body of Palestine, like an ʻōpihi against a rock 

barraged by the shore break 

This is a century’s long genocide escalating before our eyes

We are standing in the orchestra pit amid the crescendo 

The percussion of violence has continued beyond its own breaking point 

But the composers and their musicians are still pulling at their strings: 

 

it is 3am when my daughter finally drifts back off to sleep

& I am thinking  about the visibility of violence in our digital world

I am facing the fact of our privilege 

That I can make her feel safe

In a world where securities are made manifest by the twisted destiny of empires 

The guilt of this “gift” we never asked for 

Carries me back to sleep beside her

 

But The rest will not last 

The next morning we wake to the news that israel 

Has bombed yet another hospital 

While I was holding my sleeping daughter 

Other Parents run for cover with their lifeless children in their arms

I read the updates while the American national anthem

spills into our living room

We are caught in the 8am routine of empire here in Wahiawā

The daily salute to war and privilege and waste 

The bugle shakes the last of our birds free from our trees

Soon The sound of kuahine will be overwhelmed by a new rain, the M16s 

 

On the nights when the sounds of war games shake our livingroom

I play The Black Pumas on vinyl to drown out the sound of drumming riffles 

Each cracking munition takes my mind to Palestine

We live in the stolen training ground of empire’s muscle 

The tip of their imperial spear 

I have known this for years 

Perhaps it is what made me a poet in the first place

But seeing the images of the murdered caught under this weight in real time

Has made me something altogether different

 

So today I am reaching for new language  

While I am fighting every instinct to look away 

from the children and their beloved burned, shot, and hollowed

Their homes and sanctuaries crumbling around them

I know At the very least they are deserving of our witness and our indurance 

So I watch, I keep my eyes wide fucking open

 

But In these moments I have no sign or solution, 

So Instead, I am standing in my small corner of our world with a mirror

I am singing all the freedom songs I know 

First in a whisper, then in a scream 

I am sharing the news with my two-year-old daughter during breakfast, 

and bath time 

Becasue I need her to know 

Why the Palestinian boy crying is to reporter about his cousin being shot down in the street

 

So I tell her

The sounds of war that she hears daily do not exists in a vacuum  

I tell her. that she is connected to him, 

this beautiful & grieving Palestinian boy 

I send a prayer that his parents are holding him, alive, tonight too

In my dreams I imagine them both safe 

Harvesting kalo and olives in our backyards 

Drinking clean water, directly from our streams 

Lips sticky with laughter, citrus, and lihing mui 

When I dream, I see them as kin 

Not just by the sibling shelling they hear in the morning light 

No 

My daughter must know

that his home and the terror brought upon it and him

Could be hers

That in fact, it already is

She must face it 

She cannot look away 

It is ours 

It is her generations inheritance