I gather armloads of spring, the reasons: Azaleas for their closeness to the sound Of your name, luscious crab apples add My measure of blood to the beating of wings, That hidden gesture language of your arms. All of this requires celebration.

See even though I can’t raise my eyes As you speak to me, I have to look away to let My pain rest on the back of a chair or the carpet, Opening that door beyond this imagined door Brings to me your perfume mixed with coffee For that I bring these flowers that also contain you,

Honey’s essence. Such offerings are required to complete this hive, To convince myself that this really is 2003 and outside It’s spring. If the breaking of branches are the stitches Tying together my sequence of disembodied days, then placing Them in the bamboo jar is as if I am adding bits of rock to the cairn where our lives flap like prayer flags in the West wind!

This evening, by the table lamp’s light Bulbs of tulips opened their petals, Each a palm holding a mysterious heart.

And that took me back to the our talk, Those ways to pry open what is unseen, As we treaded over different but similar ground.

Even if the past is done, it resonates In how today sounds. We both know how the wood is permanently marked by those driven nails.

Those holes that stay unfilled after we pull them out or as they fall out rusted. Maybe this is essential, because how else will we know

The thickness of our human souls, if we don’t let Broken loves, evanescent springs or incidental conversations Penetrate us. This is the only knowing, the only becoming

And the only blossoming in the gathered years light!

• for Aselia,a fellow cube dweller

Someone has to mourn the dead, Someone has to remember the shape Of her body, her skull broken, her ribcage Pushed in, her heart spasming at her throat. Someone has to interpret such unfathomable grief, Someone has to read the messages of dread, her broken arms seek to convey.

Someone has to remember the weight of steel That rolled over her. And someone the edge of the blade That came back twice, seeking to restore to them their original home: a hot dusty sky. Someone has to add to her cry, another voice. Someone has to say she was too young to die.

• for Rachel Corrie She was killed on 3/16/2003 at Rafah Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip. She was trying to prevent a bulldozer from leveling a “structure”. She was 23.