My Mother Has Other Children

My Mother Has Other Children
For Bisan and the Palestinian people

It is a grace to know and also a beckoning. I remember
the first time I realized my sister had a life of her own.

Perhaps too late. I was nine. We were playing handball against
the garage, its cobblestone driveway deciding a fraction of our fate.

Us, of course, deciding the rest.
Purple firecrackers, Lilies of the Nile, line this memory’s edges.

Six years my junior, my sister was no match for my switchbacks.
I skid the rubber ball along the thin tremor where the metal met the

stone and watched her carry one loss after another.
After the ninth, maybe the tenth, she erupted into red.

An anger I’d never seen poured from her body in protest. It was the first time
I realized she existed outside of my understanding of her. I marveled

at the ripples she left in her wake. It was more than anger.
More than frustration. Perhaps a kind of grief we don’t have a name for.

It was the specific hollowing of throwing a ball into space,
hope laced into the rubber, and never meeting its return. It was

the sorrow of calling out to the world, and ten times over,
the anguish of it not calling back. I could feel it then,

could feel my mother, could feel the mother of my mother
and her mother too, all standing behind their other child,

could feel that the same earth who had always mothered me,
who had sang over the waters of my heart, who had hummed its rhythm,

who had listened to each of my prayers, whether or not the gods
had answered them, who had whispered to me tender stories

during the sleepless nights, and who had slept alongside me too,
the same earth who had told me when to become the lilies

and when to become the Nile, that earth sang for my sister too.
Cried for my sister too. Laughed with her too. Together,

they told each other stories that I may never know.
My Mother has other children, and She would move mountains

for them. So I handed my sister the ball
and let the Mother move through me.

There are days I cry for the losses of people I do not know.
The people of Gaza whisper whatever stories

will help get their babies through the night, and my body
feels the boundary between what I know and what is unfamiliar.

I can feel the Mother’s anger. I can feel the Mother’s grief.
My Mother has other children, and I am watching them bury or be buried,

their cries seeping into Her already wailing ground.
My Mother has other children,

and I am watching their hearts break,
and I am watching Her heart break,

and I am, again, learning what must be moved out of their way.

Palestinian women grinding coffee beans, 1905 via Sacred Footsteps