My Heart, My Heart

a poem

Listen to an audio recording of My Heart, My Heart:

In a noisy hospital hallway,
a Palestinian father holds, wrapped
in his blood-stained arms and splayed
on his lap, the limp, lifeless body
of his son, a boy of twelve or thirteen,
a child on the cusp of becoming a man.
Bewildered, he points a finger upward
—is it in anguish or in supplication?—
and cradles in his other hand
his son’s lolling, injured head.
“My heart, my heart,” he cries,
his dark eyes spilling tears,
his cheek pressing the boy’s bloody ear,
his hand stroking his child’s draped body,
his lips seeking to kiss love, life, back
into his dead child, his boy, his son.
“My heart, my heart,” he wails.

How do you not weep for this broken man?
How do you not grieve with helpless fathers
and inconsolable mothers who cradle and cuddle
their mauled, mutilated children one last time; 
who hunt frantically under rubble and dig, bare-handed, 
for their missing sons and daughters;
who search but find only bloody body parts 
strewn in the street, on the side of a road,
on a beach, in a destroyed schoolyard?
How does your heart not break and shatter
like a child’s bones under an Israeli tank?
How does your heart not burst 
like a baby in a bomb blast?

How many more children must be maimed,
murdered, dismembered and starved?
How many more parents must moan and mourn,
and point their fingers at the sky?
How much longer must this war rage on?

The answer is not written in the stars;
it is not divined in cards or crystal balls;
it is not blowing in the wind, my friend;
it is hidden in the stone cold hearts
of the mighty and the mad.

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