Madonna of the Rubble

Forgetting is a vain refugee camp, Madonna, for still these walls get breached, amidst the daily, frenzied barter of honed art for bread, While slaking arid, thirsty hours with bits of loving, or even in deep sleep's opiate-laced salve; your shrill wail ricochets on palisades of silence, Wrecking dreams, when your arms thrust out, ghost-like haunt heart's corridors to pained remembrance of your hearth bulldozed to jagged Rubble, grating deep your ample loins that Gaza noon of nightmare, hooking deeper yet the piercing scythes of questions as regards Your fate and of your son's. Again, the mind turns, tosses on this bed of dusty shards and tear-anointed debris as you once more scream Your picture-perfect, front-page, silent pain, yet made more potent than all sounds heard down old Palestine when wailing, wreathed The wretched walls bedaubed with blood of innocents, when wanton death and mayhem, too, by Herod's mighty hand decreed, made firm, held sway.