Border Poem by Shara Lessley

Four kilometers from Umm Qais above Galilee's steely sea
we make our retreat along an unpaved route, passing a family
sprawled beneath a terebinth. A boy scampers up the tree;
his brother fools with a two-way radio. Along another road

if I saw that, you say, I'd be all nerves. Across some border,
already men are counting bodies, taking bets: first a signal,
then the code—three touch-tones, and the convoy's done for.
It's easier to see parts than the whole, you explain, of sifting

the wreckage of machinery and bone. A half kilometer past:
you stop the jeep to let a herdsman pass—the horned breeds
falling into a kind of rank, long haired goats coming up
behind. A wattled pair stalls near the cave where, it is said,

Christ might have slept for weeks or days after driving
demons into a herd of swine. The restless flock is filing;
the weather's fine. There, you point, towards Golan Heights,
stuck in the valley's bed on the Israeli side, see that green-

blue minaret? It blasts Reggae Thursday nights; they've gutted it
into a bar. Which reminds me, somehow, of that brownstone
church-turned-nightclub I stumbled from so many years ago,
drunk, half-numb, back to some partially furnished apartment

(friend of a friend's I barely knew) where, practically nude,
I woke next morning to a roach scuttling up the overturned cup
of my bra. Who was it that said in order to sleep one must feel
safe? I stared at the wall's grey, sponge-shaped smudge

an hour (maybe two) trying to piece the previous night together
knowing a headless roach will live a week before it dies
of thirst. Some days, love, I disagree: it's no less difficult
to see the lot of us in bits. Now, the gravelly click of the jeep's

wheels rambling down the road. Eight months we've lived
in the Middle East, have yet to reach the night I dream
the embassy bombing at Kabul: half-buried, you hold
what's left—some fabric scrap, a woman's burning sandal.