Cease Fire Now

I was born in the same year
the state of Israel was formed
but that’s not exactly the right word—
formed is something joined and shaped
through stages of development
like a child learning to walk.
Whereas Israel was clay
molded by declaration, mandate, and partition,
wars that added and subtracted

a jumping rope hidden in the sand
like lines waving a mutation
of chromosome 4B on tritichin A allowing
the formation of hexaploid wheat, a
braided bread into loaves, a keening
of blues, a dustbowl for a woman
who climbed a ladder to pick olives
and delivered on a stretcher home.
It’s complicated. Who can understand it?

Home is a place where, if you must go there,
people send you somewhere else
because there is no one to welcome you.
My father arrived from Hungary, an
eleven-year-old boy influenced
by the Labor Bund
who believed Zionism was a form
of Nationalism of which the Jews already
had their fill, thank you very much.

Today I learned I’ll be a grandmother
on the same day children are being buried
in mass graves outside a hospital
that also served as a command center for Hamas.
Lives and land.
Bulldozers and tunnels.
Mine fields and ball bearings.
Brutalizing two peoples of one land.

Death squeezes more lives in a bottle-nosed grip.
If we are the same under God,
why do we keep killing each other?
Lives and land, land and lives,
an ideology that makes addicts
out of soldiers and conflict resolution
becomes an after-dinner joke
told at conference centers
with pitchers of cold water.

If they hadn’t killed Rabin,
or if Labor Zionism hadn’t been its own contradiction,
if the Oslo Peace Accords had more teeth,
if Camp David had recognized the right of return,
if Arab countries had recognized Israel’s right to exist,
if there’d been a real two-state solution,
if the world had gotten involved,
if the media had been more critical,
if it weren’t for Iran’s money.