Lebanon burns the bushes burn and I burn with it.
I ache I ache I ache another year another twelve months and the only thing that changes
Is that the clock stops ticking. They add another country to the roster.
My home is always running from me it slips through my fingers and the wood
Is solid, immortal like the oaks like the grass like the American land
American bedroom and American childhoods, and I think that the unmoving foundations are the cruelest emotions- aging into more nothingness, disappearing down the street, nostalgia of the sidewalk of the lemonade stand of the summers past, but at least my pain of growth is not the growth
Of the grave, or the roadside hospital, or the bombs and at least
When I mourn I can still have my old swing set my old stuffed animals, I can cry over the concrete
But Lebanon burns and Palestine burns and the children
Have only rubble to cry over.
O America, I sing a funeral hymn as I sit in the backyard
and I am burying bodies yes but at least
The bodies I bury are only metaphors only my own and across the sea
They bury their parents. They go into the ground
Not just in their minds, they rot they rot they rot
O America, it is hard enough to be writer, it is hard enough to mourn for what has already gone
And now the world stretches out before me, envelopes me in it’s pain in it’s sorrow
Of the olive trees burning of the Amazon burning
And there is one mournful cry as the soldiers storm somebody’s hometown and I watch I watch I watch
I watch and I scream and in the lamplight my home stands soccer fields with corpses on them playgrounds with blood on the slides nothing to mourn for,
No home, no village, no nostalgia, just the present and the next moment and the moment after
The only comfort sound familiar the lull of the drones,
A childhood memory.
The other kid’s land is gone and I am going with them, like the hills of appalachia, even though it’s not mine either,
Like the prayers of the coal miners, we are going, we are going, we are going to see the king-
O Israel it was not your land to burn.
O America it was not your land to burn.
