[I visited Qunaytra, a Syrian town near the Golan Heights, many years ago. Today, I am reminded of that visit and this poem.]

Walking in Qunaytra

A graveyard of dead giants with toppled tombstones,
a land full of ghosts with voices, sharp cries of wind
cut upon 100 miles of encircling concertina wire:
this is a town of flat houses that buckled beneath
gravity and the weight of a thousand Zionist bombs.

The day I arrived, the sun sat on the ground
and we all suffered its immense heat. Our guide
smiled at the destruction, proud of how the Syrians
have preserved this martyrdom-at-the-border,
a national idol sculpted from hate, their golden calf
for worshipping broken dreams. Broken like these
homes of old where all the lights have gone out
and laughter no longer spills from the windows,
broken like this bullet-pocked hospital
where fire-scarred staircases zig-zag up
four flights of nothingness; broken like
the heart of this nobody tourist who’s tumbled
into this place like a newborn colt battling gravity
and the weight of the sun’s brightness.

Standing on the roof-top I looked out
across one million acres of burnt brown,
so unlike back home where there’s nothing
but pissing down rain year round. We go about
our lives as though nothing else has happened
except what’s happened to us. At best we’re zombies
high on Speed and seeing the world with Technicolor
tunnel-vision. But mostly our heads are selfish wounds
we lap at all day with those equally irksome tongues
yo-yoing in and out and in-and-out the mouth.

So much nothing in my heart it wanted to leap
from the hospital roof, a seemingly meager
sacrifice to the emptiness of this place.
But looking west there was finally something:
Mount Hermon, a dirt-ramp of a mountain
presiding over the mighty Golan
and looking hardly worth dieing for.
It was here, long before I was born,
two nations offered up their sacrifices
and legions of men were torn away from this life.

Napalm fell from heaven turning a thousand men
to pillars of fire, their black hair burning
like an angry forest. The Syrian generals
escaped on horseback to the tune
of jingling medals playing upon their fat breasts.
The road to Damascus lay open like a wound
while the king’s radio station declared
an empty victory and war-weary soldiers
returned to herding goats in the hills
of their ancestors.

These are the same hills where Cain slew Abel
and blood cried out from the ground to God on high.
Blood cried out to a god who allowed
this first sacrifice of a brother
murdering his brother.

And as I walked the streets of Qunaytra,
I stopped and stooped low my ear to the ground
to discover something much worse:
that same blood flows though my heart and in my body,
still crying out to a god whose boundless love
somehow allows us this timeless curse.