Context in a Broken Duplex

“Tensions are escalating”. “Mow the grass down.”
             Stretch past pain to find poetry, the way home.
 
             Pen the past to find home. Write even the rain.
Israel, ghost nation, stains the orchards.
 
              Is rage enough to sustain a whole nation?
I dream of Palestine. Free, alive.
 
              Pull the line toward life, ask the dreamer:
Who gave the order, who profits from slaughter?
 
To make a border, make a slaughter.
               O history, O language, burst without love!
 
With love only, gauge the story—I said with
               Love—listen from the river to the sea.

              People riven from homeland list in grief.
Ten sons ululating. Mothers in the grass.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
About the Poem: The Duplex is a form created by poet Jericho Brown, melding the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. ‘Mowing the grass’ is the phrase Israeli forces have long used to describe their lethal bombardment of Palestinians. Writing this poem sickened me, even as I felt its necessity: to show the violence facilitated by language, the violence of metaphor. The Duplex as a form invites you to turn back to a line, and in turning back, change it—the line erodes in the echo, and becomes something new. Or not. Choosing when to allow that transformation takes on a devastating weight, a weight you are meant to refuse in making the last line a repeat of the first line. I chose to break that rule.