Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

The horses of Gaza—the stallions, colts, mares
the donkeys too—and mules, and jennies
who once tugged the people
on their carts, across the streets and intersections
for twenty centuries and maybe thirty,
now they scramble, the neighs, the braying,
the gallop in drummed dune-sand,
where hooves print crescent moons
with horseshoes that endure the bombings
Scrap horseshoes that were not twisted into guns
have the shapes of human jawbones, unbroken
the horses rush together, they are racing no longer
against each other, outpacing shadows
of the sun and of the warplanes,
which cost billions and still resemble
nothing more than dead birds
that fly dead-alive, with wings hardened
by death and jet-fuel
dead birds haunt the sky
because they had no cloud-deep burial,
just as the second world war
had no proper burial and was exported
to loom over the heads these Arabs
and their puny teenagers.
And the horses whose ribs protruded,
whose ribcages were played like xylophones
by Gaza’s screaming children who played
pranks and hopscotch all over the shadow of death,
the equine gallop on the beach,
mighty hooves thud out the sound of mechanical invasion
their hooves match the soughing plumage of the birds of prey
when they shake out their wings after bathing in the water.
The horses are now saddled only by flames,
with only Saracens of flame,
djinn of smoke as their riders
after rolling in the sand,
they douse their hides and manes in seawater,
leap into the coolness of death,
they breed the sea with the sky
to create a new and stolid race
The mares conceive the children of the blaze
2
and of the stallion in their fallopian tubes,
lo their children, soon as they’re born,
will be ready to ride winged foals
a harras of winged stud ponies
conceived in the burn
the only stampede worthy
of bearing the name Pegasus
trample the shadow of death in a quest
for secret lilies
until the shadow-fibers break against the quartz shards
in beach sand, hop over the dome
of the rock (gold-plated kippa
by azure waves of marble worn)
up to the seventh heaven,
drag Moses down for him to see this and to say
“I condemn all of this sordid mess, what sort
of children are they who made this rubble,
I want nothing, nada to do with it at all!”

And the hideous head of the Goliath Netanyahu
will roll
unworthy of a circumcision

Yet even if the reptilian tanks attempt to mate like lurching crocodiles,
even if the helicopters should mate like the dragonflies
whose anatomic design their engineers plagiarized
from the god of the mangrove to forge helicopters,
they will fail,
I know who will inherit these prized coasts
not for a biblical stable
not for a parking lot,
only for the field of plumed
airborne ponies.

This was foreknowledge foreseen
from the moment of their conception,
when the steeds who transported the two-leggeds
of Gaza ran,
manes afire, into that cool wave,
the chain of crests blueblack and bluewhite, the final wall,
always the last fort wall to remain standing
even as it comes ever crashing down
without prediction,
without cement of prayer.