Arts for the 21st Century

It’ll be in the Morning

It’ll be in the morning
that I will look upon you, lying next to me
for a while untroubled, and I will wish
that you should not wake, afraid that when
you stir, when your eyes of almond-brown honey
open to the world, to me next to you
and to all this might mean,
your dream will come to this awakening:
that the lion will not lie with the lamb,
that a child will not lead us to that paradisal
imagining, not because it is unreachable (I suppose),
or because it is that elusive, spectral thing
that ancient mystics contrived, their heads hazed
and misted in cloud.
It is because the hearts of the children
are torn from them in the trauma’d night
of Al Nakba. It is because they die so young
because they are herded early in the morning of their lives
into camps with the approval stamp of the world;
or they grow old to be reborn into
the hopelessness of that revolving door
through São Jorge da Mina, through Auschwitz and Gaza
and their ghosts still wander the dust of Soweto
It’ll be in the morning
that I will lie beside you thinking the softness
of your eyes fluttering on the brink of return
must not be disturbed, not
while the backpacks of the little ones of the Garden
of Martyrs lie unmourned, unclaimed
by those scrap-heaping them to collateral
damage, crushed blossoms that belie an Arab,
Libyan, People’s Spring – any one’s spring.
Your lashes quivering back from sleep
will weep for lives that are expendable,
for the children, for everyone
for bodies emaciated and disposable,
in spaces that must return to the source.
Gentle eyelids convolute to anger and to tears.
And why should I seek your up-rising
in the morning?
Sleep little one, sleep. But the time soon come –