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.