In Gaza breast milk for two years a well-spaced brother organic baby food furniture safety-checked growth carefully plotted then a well-chosen small school private lessons perhaps helmets even for sledding certainly for riding, figure skating enrichment in Gaza small figures bundled in white some still bleeding after the news I check them in their beds all's well, it's still my children against their's ______ Stream of Israel It's the next year in Jerusalem. We've agreed to meet: you from Rumania, me from Canada; a recovering Christian, a non-observing Jew. Marriages and children aborted, we visit both the burial places of Mary, wonder at her choices. In a thin-sided, clanking little car we take frozen water bottles and a few clothes into the desert where anything can happen: where a one-handed, born-again sky-diver might land and be known to us as Charlie; where waiting to pick him up might be Captain Fuad, late of the Lebanese army, working as a journalist. So when we settle for lunch on a remote dusty terrace or rush to supper in a narrow café, the mix is vital: helicopter aerial photography, fishing with dynamite, art and music desperate for North American representation. Driving to the coast we thumb our noses at Caesar, at the Crusaders, their walls, aquaducts, arenas; instead slide into a dark old town and a dirty sea. A cold shower that night probably saves my life. Up to Lebanon and back: border guards, kibbutzim, oranges, a city on a mountain. At the top you offer me exactly nothing but the view. I take it and I leave it, only keep three sandy potsherds picked from the rubble of the walls of the City of David - one for Muslim, one for Christian, one for Jew. ______ Ethnic cleansing I don't want to be you or them. They are the ones who come at night with or without hoods depending on which minister sends them depending on where you were born or your parents or where you are standing now. We are the ones who let it happen again and again and again and you are me sometimes and sometimes I am them. _______ Jerusalem My shorts really were too short for walking up on Jerusalem's walls I received many offers, the most civilized being how many camels my companion would take for me After a few days I switched to skirts which, however sheer, elicited no comments I broke other rules drank from a public water fountain bought falafel from a man in the street Became quite ill my peaceful Canadian intestinal fauna struggling with that of Arab and Jew Sat down with both and with Christians at their tables an easy thing to do when you are just visiting That peaceful summer the only thing the one thing that caught my notice They checked my purse when I entered the stores shoplifting being the least of their worries
Louise Carson is published in Jones Av., Cahoots, Freefall, Poetry-Quebec, Other Voices and poetsagainstwar.ca with work upcoming in Event, Our Times and The Nashwaak Review.
