Free Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye

THE PALESTINIANS HAVE GIVEN UP PARTIES

    Once singing would rise
    in sweet sirens over the hills
    and even if you were working
    with your trees or books
    or cooking something simple
    for your own family,
    you washed your hands,
    combed water through your hair.

    Mountains of rice, shiny shoes,
    a hurricane of dancing.
    Children wearing little suitcoats
    and velvet dresses fell asleep in circles
    after eating 47 Jordan almonds.

    Who’s getting married? Who’s come home
    from the far place over the seas?

    Sometimes you didn’t even know.
    You ate all that food without knowing.
    Kissed both cheeks of anybody who passed,
    slapping the drum, reddening your palm.
    Later you were full, rich,
    with a party in your skin.

    Where does fighting
    come into this story?

    Fighting got lost from somewhere else.
    It is not what we like: to eat, to drink,
to fight
.

    Now when the students gather quietly
    inside their own classroom
    to celebrate the last day of school,
    the door to the building

    gets blasted off.
    Empty chairs where laughter used to sit.
    Laughter lived here
    jingling its pocket of thin coins
    and now it is hiding.

    It will not come to the door dressed as a soapseller,
    a peddler of matches, the old Italian
    from the factory in Nablus
    with his magic sack of sticks.

    They have told us we are not here
    when we were always here
.
    Their eraser does not work
.

    See the hand-tinted photos of young men:
    too perfect, too still.
    The bombs break everyone’s
    sentences in half.
    Who made them? Do you know anyone
    who makes them?
The ancient taxi driver
    shakes his head back and forth
    from Jerusalem to Jericho.
    They will not see, he says slowly,
    the story behind the story,
    they are always looking for the story after the story
    which means they will never understand the story.

    Which means it will go on and on.

    How can we stand it if it goes on and on?
    It is too long already
.
    No one even gets a small bent postcard
    from the far place over the seas anymore.

    No one hears the soldiers come at night
    to pluck the olive tree from its cool sleep.

    Ripping up roots. This is not a headline
    in your country or mine.
    No one hears the tiny sobbing
    of the velvet in the drawer.

HALF-AND-HALF

    You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
    on the first feast day after Ramadan.
    So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
    He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
    chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
    anyone else. Says he.

    At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
    he’s sweeping. The rubbed stones
    feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
    across faces of date-stuffed
mamool
.

    This morning we lit the slim white candles
    which bend over at the waist by noon.
    For once the priests weren’t fighting
    in the church for the best spots to stand.
    As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
    This is partly why he prays in no language
    but his own. Why I press my lips
    to every exception.

    A woman opens a window—here and here and here—
    placing a vase of blue flowers
    on an orange cloth. I follow her.
    She is making a soup from what she had left
    in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
    She is leaving nothing out.

BUTTER BOX

    To close: Fold in small end flaps. Insert Flap A
    into Flap B as shown
.

    There is a picture to help us.
    Also an announcement:
Carton has been opened
.
    In case we are stumbling through an afternoon,
    have lost our way, or plate and knife confound us.

    Once a plastic bag intoned:
There should be a suggestion
    of firmness in the cooked macaroni
. Not entirely firm,
    not utterly anything, just a
suggestion
.

    But I don’t want to close the butter box
    with the butter in it. Place a single brick
    in the pink dish, extra three

    stacked in waiting, box discarded.
    See how much help we didn’t need?

SMOKE

    The new slash of road curves up beside five sleeping smokestacks.
    Four stand together, one apart—the lucky or the lonely one,