Do you think father remembers
those tales he used to share? Ancient stories of little boys exchanging salaams and shaloms while figs and olives grew alongside grapes, together, under one sun and one rain shower, serving to nurture old, dampen soil.
That was long ago,
long before we ten children. Long before the earth cracked, giving in to whimpers and screamless voices and the scorching of that barren hill. Decades passed, and now
I remember
how exotic produce still grows from that parched terrain: the luscious leaves of grape vines, the basket of cactus fruit father would bring back after a morning in the market. He is older now, yet streaks of youthfulness parade brightly through his head of grey. He retained his brisk stride, each leg like the root of the firmest olive tree. Do you remember
how, together, we would stand on the rooftop every morning, peering innocently at that forbidden hill. An obsession that occupied our Palestinian veins, now buried under a little boy’s yarmulke, within the bareness of that hill, stained with auburn blood, a hill carrying the life of a single tree. A forbidden tree. Or as we called it, the Rafiki tree.
Remember?
It was like watching the dead
give birth to life.
