Burned tree stumps are healing on the road into the city. 
Singing has returned to the school yard.
Blue lights and red crescents dissolve
to a green and white suburb smelling of mint and bread.
Children are asking you, a world expert in play, to join them
in the unshattered square where iron is still wrought 
into fancy benches and faux Parisian streetlights.
The father has brushed the crumbs of concrete from his baby.
He stands kissing its pink cheeks in his best suit.
The grandmother’s fists that broke crawling out of the rubble
now peg out the washing along a balcony.

Wake now. They are already figments.
Truth is holding a press conference, in the usual camouflage.
The warrior mathematicians use war logic to turn words 
into numbers so we do not weep. 
They draw a radius over a satellite image of a hospital 
microwaved by a bomb they measure in millimeters. 
An incursion is long division, street-by-street, home-by-home, 
where remainders cannot be identified from the scraps 
of human bric-a-brac among the mattresses and toys.

Tonight, Salma maps out a new world wonder on her Mac.
She creates the next World Expo over Palestine’s catacombs 
in Rimal where her parents kept the family home.
Her soft pavilions arise in biomorphic hives to celebrate 
the Great Libraries of the Levant from Alexandria to Nineveh.

Gaza once meant ‘The Treasury’, she says, 
before silk merchants stole its name for ‘gauze’.
Gaza. A milky screen that softens the gaze. 
Gaza. A cloth for draining curds from whey. 
Gaza. A strip for masking any human pain.غزة

On her balcony, we catch the muezzin’s breath turning
clouds into dragons across the Hajar mountains
where plastic bags have blown hundreds of miles 
to perch like owlsin ghaf trees under the occupying moon.

This is the graven hour when stones talk 
as they have done since Moses, 
audible only to snakes and official spokespersons.
Each commandment will fly its mission with fiery horns
and wings of thunder over the Earth’s smithereen skull
until there is nobody left to listen.

Mark Fiddes lives and writes in the Middle East. He is winner of this year's Ledbury Poetry Prize and his most recent collection is Other Saints Are Available (Live Canon, 2021).