Lifting Us

The Settlement

Jibril's Farm

Amal's Father

In A Hostile World

Zahra

Short Bio

Lifting Us

Words lift us
into an oblivion
of meaning

Chanting
precious
fragrant
psalm after psalm
    after psalm
         with melodious
                voices

so unaware
of all that has been
                     scraped
                  of meaning

           as bulldozers churn

 uprooting
    orchard after orchard
        after orchard of
            precious
              fragrant
                 trees

The Settlement
 

The stones are neatly stacked
With chiseled symmetry
That stretches absorbing all that is wall
Surface bleaching blending branding scar

The stones nest a rack
Of chiseled symmetry
Being a linear exception
To all that we are.

Jibril's Farm
 

The olive grove glistens
deep silver green.
Slants of oiled light
slither from narrow leaves.

Step into the Olive Grove:
Tenacious trees whirl
tightly coupled to the land,
while that silver green light
slithers smoothly into shapes-
small dark orbs that drop
delicious, into your hand.

Come harvest the fruits
Of three thousand years.

And the Olive Grove thunders
With a torrent of trespass-
Dust swirls through their rage
Wreathing them with a haloed pride.

And the Olive Grove flashes
with a blur of rapacious fists
pummeling Arab brown skin.
Brawn bruises black and green
and blue and white
and liquid splatters of red
as branches of bones
Snap

into limbs widely scattered.

Amal's Father
 

She remembers
his gold tooth glittering
through the gray bars
in the small square window
of the prison van and the
prison van rumbling away
into the darkness.
She was eight years old
and she shivered in her pajama top
shivered to smile for him and wave
good-bye

and her grief was shame
that her buttons didn't match
and her sleeve was torn.

Her father's ominous crime
was that he was a Palestinian
who punched a Jew in Israel
And made him bleed.

Her father's ominous crime was that twice
his fishing boat was burned

and his family impoverished
and his land usurped.

and a year in jail.

The darkness closes in tightly
like a noose.
and breathe comes short
stealing from her sentences.

Stealing balance and being
as dizzy thoughts rumble
into the darkness.
 

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In A Hostile World
 

molecules shift
new clothes are reduced to threaded strings-
the puppet's rags tattered into moods.
mismatched and strange
in a foreign land, making me stranger
to myself.

misinterpretations edge
into every stance. mind blind,
as if my lack of language
is a lack of me, and dignity is a dream
oceans and oceans away.

molecules shift. silence shushes questions
quells facts, forces the worst in us
to burble up like sulfur springs
where there should be water.

a dirty mirror, smudged and smeared,
uglies all that leans into its murked glass,
distorts all words and deeds  into menace...
gruesome tortures
where there should be reach
and wonder and joy,

molecules shift, air attacks breath
ground erupts under foot

sulfur springs-
so pretty from afar.

i remember pretty; oceans and oceans away...
it's in my energy reflected in bright faces
it's in light and laughter
and touching reach
with wonder and joy.
 

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Zahra
 

Sweet flower
of the hills
cringe from the crush
of boot and sword
bend and blend
into summer's  leaf.

Brown, brown is the seed
that spikes into bloom.

Brown brown is the earth
that joins roots to rain

Brown, brown are your eyes
sweet Zahra

now closed to all the pain.

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Short bio:

Anne Selden Annab lives in central Pennsylvania with her husband and three children. Since 9-11 she has written at least a thousand protest letters to various people, mainly  President Bush and American newspaper editors, hoping to help convince America and American Institutions to stop being mindless puppets to anti-Arab, anti- Muslim, &  anti- Semite propaganda, and trying to convince her congressmen to stop funding and endorsing Israel's racist war on the Palestinians.  Her protest letters have been printed in the New York Times, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times and the Patriot News. Someday she hopes to go back to writing just poetry, but too many people on every side of Israel's walls are suffering at the moment.