Cultivation
One of my students showed me the orchards
of her family deleted, the land rewritten.
And photos of the displaced and lost.
That was a year before the invasion
of Gaza and the erasure of trees
down to the splinters of stories.
The granaries broken, houses
split open, and now the last refuge
to be raised and offered as proof
of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-
hawks, griffons... no longer raptors
but lost to the vanishing point.
Erosion is policy and endgame
its intonation. The Israeli military
is attempting to rewrite definitions
of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.
Closing the crossing, harrying
the edges, compressing and dispersing
the soil until it is dust or slurry.
Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.
John Kinsella
