I have so much pain in my heart for my people; I have no room for others. She pulls her voice short of breaking, her face set hard beneath a blue and white head scarf. Victory breeds enmity, the Buddha says, seeing her from beneath his tree, his many eyes turning inside and out, a lighthouse whose beam cuts near perfect darkness, leaving a lot of it behind. The shepherd and his journalist get back into a jeep, a soldier-in-uniform-only threatening them. Turn off your camera. Get off your land. Security and peace depend on theft. They killed my friends.
Land is space, and we know that space offers a harbor. But you can’t have too much land. And land is only surface, as Kauai’s billionaire knows, building his bunkers under the land he bought from farmers and fishermen. Others he threatened with legal action. There’s also sky, hard to control, and clouds, nearly impossible. And the mountains, despite their stasis, harbor emotions he can’t know, and in not knowing, fears. In heavy rains, the Pali gets covered with mud and downed trees; it takes earth movers to push it all back to the road’s shoulder. Earth movers covered tents in Gaza, lifted bodies up.
The Madonna is a bulldozer; her careful arms are iron, her face a
dark cab. She’s a puppet of the state, by way of an
operator who thinks of her less as mother than as machine. His
cab frees him to do what he would not do at home. His fear seems to
be his alone, although others use him for his power. Bulldoze
the earth to tame it. Mother earth is not mother unless she's angry.
Note: the first sentence was spoken by an Israeli settler; the Buddha’s words are from the Dhammapada.
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