This is a poem that could be dedicated to Mahmoud Darwish.
I think I know his spirit is very much,
and some of his words are very much in it.
It's called "Pomegranate."
"Mid-October, ripe as a pomegranate on a market stall
in a myth so often turned by Western women you'd think that
each one had lived the story.
He, from elsewhere, draws upon other stories, other rhythms
in which to tell them.
Echoes numbers and an alphabet which I trace out,
halting and childish.
While he speaks to the Greek, the Kurd, the Spaniard,
questions language with a displaced Iraqi,
and the Jew who riddled in no man's language,
the trope of homeland.
Waits and reads the paper and some small cafe.
Who will be the foreigner?
Who, the lover?
After years' displacements, the words
risk having a double meaning.
Risk or have the luck of a double meaning in their roots.
Some words have their own ideas.
So a line with bullets in it transforms them
deftly to sparrows.
Why not, waiting right in the spiral notebook,
birds remembered bullets?
The rooftop terrace pots of bougainvillea.
Autumn rain clouds mass above rooftops in a city
where women read the paper in cafes, yes, just the way
he does, waiting for not more than sunlight,
the jolt of caffeine, a glass of water.
I reach out and pick up the pomegranate,
palm its blemished rind, purple pocked
by clustered egg-like ruby seeds that could splash a blood stain
across a doorstep.
Memorizing new verbs and nouns, home, journey, write, school,
study, family, brother, sister, and a mother's
name which can mean, in context, pilgrim or exile."