G. Cora Fraser: Palestine's Tree of Life Is Dying

Palestine's Tree of Life Is Dying

A Settler's car shifts gear
Drives headlong
Into Grandmother
Palestine
Carrying a basket
Of olives in her arms
Hurried as soldiers
Dump a barricade
Soil and rubble piled high
On the roadway
But the settler
Did the trick
In his own way
Pushing life
Into shadow's embrace
As blood burst forth
From ancestral veins
Her fruit trees
Withered and died
Not from IDF bullets
Flying like hail
In a wind storm
But from Settlements
Gushing
Rivulets of sewage
To village and orchards
Below
Death spread
To the rooted Life
She once lived
Before Al Nakba's
Brutal theft of her home
Occupation captured
The remains
Of her labors
Settlements cursed
Pastoral dreams
Long ago
Verdant fields of the Holy Land
Poisoned and walled in
While Shepherd's tend sheep
Settlers steal their birthright
Belching forth insults
Insisting they leave
Self-proclaimed
Heirs of Abraham's Seed
Sow terror
Malice and forethought
Used to rend and cleanse
The fabric of Arabic civil life
So Israel can overspread
Like a cancer
Till dead
Grandmother's body
Lays strewn on the thoroughfare
Broken as the basket of olives
She held
The fruit she once tended
Is scattered
Crushed
With the dust
In the road

ENDS