Rashidieh

On the roof

After midnight

She can see her wire-connected world clearly.

Antennas, clotheslines, electrical wires

A jungle of connections

Inside the barbed wire barriers

Separating past from present

Hopes of a future

Buried alongside the living



Before midday she likes to journey underground

To her place of security

A dark damp enclosure of blood, feces and snot

A memory now

Consciously brought into the present

Like the splash of a child jumping into a swimming pool



She brings her visitors here

Nurses from Denmark, doctors from France, journalists from Sweden

Eager to treat this malady

Of homelessness and ennui

She proudly exhibits the blood stains

Knocks on the concrete

And smells its memories on her finger tips

Into the evening



She tells the story of the 40 day siege

Of how rats were eaten in this very place

Out of desperation

She knows the story in three languages

And smiles as she tells the tale of terror to the doctors in despair.

In the evenings she visits the graveyards of martyrs

Placing neat configurations of stones,

Not flowers,

Triangles

Circles

Squares

The perfect geometry of death



And at night

She sits on the roof

Eyes traveling the antennas

Patrolling the alleys below

Barefoot children

Young man with permanent grease stains under their fingernails

playing dominoes

Women with marks of childbirth and loss

Taking in clothes from neighbors’ roofs



Alone in her bed

She finds herself.

A body scarred but untouched

Feet swollen from marching

Tongue thick from preaching

Fingertips moist from their underground journeys



When the generators are turned off

Dominoes packed away

And the whispers of men and women no longer creep down the

olive vines,

She sneaks underground

Closes the hatch over her

Until memory,

Her lover,

wakes her at sunrise.