Stardust tears and foam cap do overs

I. 1

I am silken innocence wrinkled and torn- I am a thousand paper fliers whose black capped words are corroded in the dust of a thousand and one shoe soles. My heart beats with the rhythmic lament of gunshots, creating sparks along the sand stained wall. 2

II. 3

Eleven years young- and already the dying have more numbers than the years of scratching out answers onto lined paper and chasing weathered feet down chipped cobblestone and sandpaper streets. Head in my hands, as I perch on dilapidated porches I watch the stars crawl into a sky free of lamenting burkas and exploding glass. 4

III.5

I have shrapnel eyes, and Listerine eyelashes that no amount of pinching my sun browned skin will sedate. Toy soldiers will fall tonight ‘ breathed in midnight moon breath of curly haired boys at school whose smiles were colored by a sadistic hope, one of wishing for breaths to settle in ammonia lungs and heartbeats to be rendered still.6

The same hope whose broken wings crashed and rammed into the abyss of seeing tanks roll over the rubble of hide and seek games and tag. My throat stretches to blow breath into inflections of preliminary grief but even here surrounded by the barbed wire of nothingness and cracked shingled houses would my words seep into a divided path of our fathers. The battles that create tetanus barriers down tank rolled smooth streets. 7

I.V8

I want to call them stupid and dim the brushfires burning behind the lightening strikes of their eyes- and hum to them the mourning wails of black shrouded teenagers whose babies have burnt to ash.9

I want to give them words to understand that the ‘Freedom fighters’ are puppeteers whose sand storm eyelashes won’t whisper when one of them blows themselves up in a crowd, only to bring machine guns into toddlers dreams. 10

But this hope is intoxicating, smelling of a disillusioned sanity that they could have a home again, and for some for the first time. That there could be more beyond chain link electric fences is Tide soap scented hope that ‘Freedom Fighter’ words airbrush so they can’t see the piles of dead bodies it takes to get there. Because even as our people have dug our heels into the Desert- so has the other side, one that must cry too when their brother is brought home on a bloodies stretcher- one whose mothers’ lullabies must keen into the starless night as douses herself in remembering the times their baby might have not known war. 11

As the vibration of bulletproof windows shake my feet- I know it inside of me that there is more to the harsh guns of the soldiers and the chiseled chin hairs they show on the portable Television that I saw once in a bursting classroom and empty store. 12

My letters sing wailing syllables of a fear that can be graphed on the same circle as mine although they are centered on different coordinates.13

Once I wrote empty – curious warm bread letters onto paper and gave it to the photographer who came to our camp. My classmates smiled and begged to be in photographs, for their eight-year stories to be told- but I grinded my fingernails on hard plaster to fill half a torn paper with writing- to be taken to the other side, I wanted to know who might answer. 14

V.15

He wrote back. Telling me of white cap oceans, and real buildings that reached for the sky but that sometimes became dynamite flowers when bodies blew up around them. He’s afraid to get on these non-bulletproof windows with wheels called buses because their engines become fire, and his heart might stop beating. He walks around the Holy City – Jerusalem. His feet carry him everywhere and he hides in cubbyholes under archways sometimes, because Arabic spews curses at him and shakes their fists at him, and he doesn’t like to be scared. 16

Politicians who come see us- and sign photos and tell us of running water and markets where there is always food, and never smelly or rotten- make us swear to remember that the Jews like him are bad, that they stole our land. As they make us promise to them, their lips make the movements of promises that they will bring us jobs, and the market food and stream water that runs through pipes, but they always come back, in nice turbans or jackets, and say they forgot, or it was someone else. But it’s always the same beards. 17

I don’t believe the beards quoting Qu’rans and being martyrs. ‘He’ is just like me, I think- he tells me he likes running and jumping and playing marbles. I tell him “I always seem to be running, and its exciting when its just me but when the bullets race me, it gets scary- because then I have to hide too.” 18

V.I19

No one knows I write letters- sometimes they don’t come for months although once I looked on a map, and my fingerprint covered the distance between him and me. I hide them in my skirts and when I do my homework for school, although when my father’s friends are over I have to cover my face because they say girls shouldn’t learn, I read his words and pretend I can hear him speaking them.20

He tells me in America where he went once- they call him Kevan and that once he went to a lakeside cottage, which is a little house on the side of a tiny ocean, surrounded by land. 21

I asked him if its surrounded like barbed wire, trapping it in, and he told me it was ‘a little bit’. I couldn’t imagine that much water just saying in one place- the ocean is believable because I saw a gossamer photo, once.22

V.II23

He uses big words sometimes and I have to remember them and carry them in my gums like candy to ask my teacher. His black imprinted writing told me about ‘Holocaust’ and burning and thousands of people killed for being Jewish, and of barbed wire fences. He tells me with tearstains on the words (not really, I just imagine it) that little children were suffocated if they couldn’t work, and that he can understand why misanthropes sometimes hate the world. 24

I ask him why, and how, and what? 25

But then I tell him about always being too hot- even in winter and about watching out for snakes as we walk through the sand and slide down the dunes and momentarily fly. I tell him about how I had a home once – but the big guns told us to get out and before we came here, we were staying in a different camp closer to our old house that had beds and smelled like cold water and hot bread and cooked chicken. He listens to the paper as it writes the way I just took off running from that camp, feet burning on the hot pavement and at sundown, prayer time I sat outside our house and saw other people going into it- black shirts and laughing people. I was six years young then.26

V.III27

I explained my name to him once- defining me in the first letter.28

Dear other book that’s not Qu’ran boy,29

My name is Azhar- 30

I am Palestinian, which means refugee, 31

which means no home and barbed wires 32

which means I don’t know how to cry anymore33

because the moon stole my stardust sadness 34

because it echoes in everyone else of my people,35

who don’t belong. We are a nothingness people- 36

because we have nothing to lose. 37

I’m a shrapnel girl with plaster veins, I don’t38

care who wins this war anymore- I just want it to39

be over, and to be able to stand on sand and say40

it’s the sand of my people, even if its two footprints.41

Tell me about you!42

Do you know what’s a pen pal? The photographer43

said we are pen pals.44

Praised be to Allah,45

Azhar 46

I.X47

My teacher hushed me when I asked her about ‘Holocaust’ – she told me it didn’t happen, and she pulled me to the floor to pray. My father breathed lightening storms and clapped his thunder hands in front of my face- I nodded when he told me it was a lie, but I was lying because I believed ‘ocean that’s not surrounded by barbed wire, and water that’s like it’ boy. 48

He told me that the way hate had infected the big guns and barbed wire builders and the long ago angry people who wanted to kill the children of his people because they read another book- was why some people hated all humans. 49

He showed me some of his Hebrew writing- and I didn’t understand why people wanted to kill them, why the boys at my school laugh and say Jew is a funny name- I think the writing is pretty.50

He says people hate each other for no reason- and that he wished he could give me a home and change my name so I could be ‘ wave girl who has a home.’ 51

I told him about the boys at school and in jumbled words the way I want to tell them 52

‘ I don’t know how to tell them that there is a reason our peoples mothers and sisters and daughters exhale sand dune sorrow when the men’s voices crack the air with adrenaline highs of returning to homes they left half a century away. But eleven 365 entities of playing hide and seek with bullets and watching with sad eyes as camouflaged soldiers won’t look at the dirty children chasing them who are seeking promised liberation on the backs of anyone who might give them a home and erase refugee from their names. ‘ 53

X. 54

He wrote me in a letter he was scared- he saw someone become ash in front of him, and he could have been our age. He told me the war crept closer to him each day. He told me we should meet me. He told me he wanted the war to be over too- he asked me to help him make it happen. 55

A couple days after that letter- after my words promised you yes- rumors flew on whispering wings and the boys brushfire eyes spun gleeful hate because the crossfire bullets crossed over borderlines and stole a little boy as he hid in an archway. 56

X.I57

In that moment- I learned to cry again, stardust tears- and promises unread and broken before they were even whole. 58

In stick figure sand drawings, I vowed that one day I’d live to see the boys at school walk through the Holy City and coax a toddler out of hiding who wore a Yarmulke and read the words that weren’t Arabic but beautiful Hebrew. I vowed that I’d come meet you finally- even if it was to your grave, and I’d cry for you, and I’d promise to never become a misanthrope and eyelashes would blink pearl drops from cobblestone eyes59

and I’d whisper that I always believed you.60

The girl who grew up and stands at your grave whispering to you and singing a list of words once traded in hidden letters- will no longer be shrapnel eyes and gel cap breaths but ‘wave girl whose home is Palestine, a country at peace with Israel’. 61