Absent Friends
For the staff and sisters of the St Joseph Hospital, Jerusalem
I never thought I would be too afraid To contact an old friend. My hand reaches For the telephone but I find myself drawing Back in case the lines have been torn down Or your number belongs to a stranger now, Speaking a language I cannot share. And For all I know, the letter I keep trying to write Will be left on a doorstep without a house Left standing behind it. Or it will lie in some Depot somewhere with all the other post Whose owners are not there now to lay Claim to them. I should not be so morbid. You are probably alive somewhere, all of You, avoiding the gunfights as I would dodge A downpour of rain. It is just that I keep Remembering the summer of the Jubilee And the gaping hole where the Hyatt Hotel Was meant to stand. The children played Among the plastic sheeting and rubble. A Dusty vision of the battlefield waiting to Break the Promised Land. Noor, black-eyed, With a face like the morning, the many tiny Hands that reached out to me on my way up The Neblus Road. I smell Shawarma cooking And the elixir of Arab coffee, wonder just a little If I could think myself back home for a moment. Why did it feel like home? The draughty evenings In Said’s café, watching the men smoking Nargile And quarrelling over a game of backgammon. “Yallah! Yallah!” The clatter of counters and the Sound of a coming riot. Hannan complaining about Her patients all the way to the Al-Arab hostel with Its cockroaches and cheap American films. Then Silence along the ramparts of Jerusalem. Sunset over The Mount of Olives. It will soon be time for the land To stay awake in anguish, sweating blood, but for now The lights of happy homes come on one by one and It is easy to believe that the stillness has meaning. I do not think myself lucky to hear the Dona Nobis Pacem ringing out across the sleepy corridors--slightly Flat--at Holy Mass. A telling off from Rima marks The day, not the Englishman bleeding in the doorway Or the warning barked in the corner of a Gaza Camp: “They do not understand diplomacy.”
--Fiorella de Maria
Fiorella de Maria lives in Guildford, England, with her husband Edmund and their two little children. She is the author of two novels, The Cassandra Curse and Father William's Daughter, and has a website at www.fiorellademaria.com.
