Issue/Publication: The Torture Quartet and Other Acts of Poetry

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I am dreaming, as are a majority of Palestinians, about getting some sleep. We close our eyes because we are tired, but during our sleep we hear the loud sound of missiles, which are fired with the purpose of disrupting people’s sleep and causing fear. A majority of the buildings have no windows or doors due to the effects of the shelling—email from gaza 2006

a meteor is actually an object usually ranging from the size of a dust particle to a rock that enters Earth's atmosphere, and is heated by the friction of air resistence—Gary Kronk

a tear in the sky

When celestial bodies crash togetherThey do so in darkness and in silence.Rather than destruction universes are bornRather than occupations planets are settledIn their milky contentment and rotations continueGalaxies uninterrupted. In my dreams planets split, comets explodeStars rupture. A new sky is bornConstellations and myths drawn To morning light. A story that is trueAt the moment of its birthAnd becomes legend as it is told and repeated This is force of our heaven It remains innocent in our prayers. if I made a wish on everystar that dropped to the eartharranged each into a private constellationthe story would include the name of this landas the home of my father, this country would harbor my children and it would never be undone. if I pointed to every comettrailing dusty light across the darknesscaught the particles of rock I would wash my face in the mist of meteors, wear in on my clothesHand it to others as I walk the streetsTheir piece of heavenAnd constant truth I never imagined I could own the skyCould commandeer its expanse, its vast canvass. It wails to me now as I stand at the brokenWindow listening to the whistlesOf rockets, of missiles shatteringThe atmosphere. I wonder at the painIt must feel as the rockets tearAt its fabric and shudder the stars. The fire in the sky is not a recyclingOf the galaxy but the clamor that givesOur nightmares their presence. We worryThat death is not just beside usIn the masses of glass and rockBut a dying goes on beyond usin the Pleiades, the nebula the aurorain solar systems not yet born Who owns the sky? Who can transformIt to a terrible roadway to annihilationTo the amplification of terror thatInhabits our anxious bodies. I try to restTo hold the children in our own rotationsAnd revolutions. In their frightened facesI understand we are attacked from the skyFrom a distance that is obscureIt is easier when they cannot face usAnd our heavenliness.