This is for Amal, whose name means hope,

who thinks of each tree she’s planted like a child,

whose family has lived in the same place

for a hundred years, and when I say place

I mean this exact patch of land

where her father was born, and his father,

so that the shoots he planted before her birth

now sweep over her head. Every March

she plucks the green almonds and chews

their sour fuzzy husks like medicine.

I have never stayed anywhere long enough

to plant something and watch it settle into its bloom.

I am from a people who move.

Who crossed sea and desert and city

with stone monuments, with clocks, with palaces,

on foot, on skeleton trains, through barracks

with iron bunks, aching for a place we could stay.

All our prayers, all our songs for that place

where we had taken root once, where we had been

the ones to send the others packing and now—

Amal laughs with all her teeth and her feet

tickle the soil when she walks. She moves

through her land like an animal. She knows it

in the dark. She feeds stalks to the newborn

colt and collects its droppings like coins

to fertilize the field. Amal loves this land

and when I say land I mean this

exact dirt and the fruit of it

and the sheep who graze it and the children

who eat from it and the dogs who protect it

and the tiny white blossoms it scatters in spring.

And when I say love I mean Amal has never married.

All around her land the settlements sprout like weeds.

They block out the sun and suck precious water

through taps and pipes while Amal digs wells

to collect the rain. I am writing this poem

though I have never drunk rain

collected from a well dug by my own hands,

never pulled a colt through

the narrow opening covered in birth fluid

and watched its mother lick it clean,

or eaten a meal made entirely of things

I got down on my knees to plant.

And when I say settlement I mean

I love the red tiled roofs,

the garden in the shape of a garden,

water that comes when I call it forth

with the flick of my wrist and my hand on the tap.

Only lately I find that when I ache

it takes the shape of a well.

And when I bleed I emit a scent

something like a sheep in heat,

like dirt after rain,

like a patch of small white flowers

too wild to name.