Wood and Flesh

By Tara Menon

This is what puzzles me –

why do I have to be afraid in my home

when I haven’t done anything wrong?

I’m only the penniless heiress

to my murdered father, double recipient of injustice,

first from being dispossessed,

second by a stray bullet that pierced his capacious heart,

felling him like a sturdy tree in its prime.

My father’s house now belongs to a stranger.

Someone else plants a tree,

where he cultivated an orchard.

Our land, Palestine, is being resettled

faster than the sea swallows territory,

faster than the rapid beats of a hummingbird’s wings,

faster than the time it takes you to read my words.

My son pines for his homeland,

painting residences for a living in America.

As he swipes his brush against the exteriors

he often recalls his grandfather’s house,

which he gazed at from a distance

as if he were a tourist in his ancestor’s soil.

The home I live in currently

is threatened by rains of bullets and bombs.

Who knows whether I’ll survive my house

or whether we’ll go together, wood and flesh,

and who will live where the foundation

and my brown feet now stand?

My melancholic voice carries in the wind,

accompanied by the rustling of leaves

and, by the work of jinn,

stores messages in the hollows of trees

for others to decipher and lament over.

 

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her latest poems have been published in Don’t Die Press, The Decolonial Passage, Emrys Online Journal, Indolent Books, Wards Literary Magazine, Art in the Time of Covid-19, Rigorous, Infection House, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Tiger Moth Review.