Proposal by Fady Joudah

Proposal 

I think of god as a little bird who takes

To staying close to the earth,

The destiny of little wings

To exaggerate the wind

And peck the ground.

I see Haifa

By my father and your father’s sea,

The sea with little living in it,

Fished out like a land.

I think of a little song and

How there must be a tree.

I choose the sycamore

I saw split in two

Minaret trunks on the way

To a stone village, in a stone-thrower mountain.

Were the villagers wrong to love

Their donkeys and wheat for so long,

To sing to the good stranger

Their departure song?

I think of the tree that is a circle

In a straight line, future and past.

I wait for the wind to send 

God down, I become ready for song.

I sing, in a tongue not my own:

We left our shoes behind and fled.

We left our scent in them

Then bled out our soles.

We left our mice and lizards 

There in our kitchens and on the walls.

But they crossed the desert after us,

Some found our feet in the sand and slept,

Some homed in on us like pigeons,

Then built their towers in a city coffin for us . . .

I will probably visit you there after Haifa.

A little bird to exaggerate the wind

And lick the salt off the sea of my wings. I think

God reels the earth in when the sky rains

Like fish on a wire.

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,

Becomes a bird to see of the land 

What it otherwise wouldn’t.

And the wind through the trees

Is the sea coming home.