The Golan Heights, 1968
(Incident that failed to appear in any newspaper or radio report: Three unarmed Arab men attempting to steal cattle were killed by an Israeli Army patrol)
Imagine you are a child with a brown crayon
and draw hills: Bump. Line. Bump. Another line.
Imagine you're a hawk, and circle those hills,
searching for rodents in the dry grass.
Imagine you're a bee in the busy season
probing daisies, larkspur, overwhelmed by poppies.
Here, winter is mud; spring, flowers; summer, prairie fire.
Imagine you are grown up to be a soldier
perched in a spy tower on a barren hill.
The hawk ignores you.
The flowers grow elsewhere.
The mud finds you, all right.
And now it's fall, a chill dry season unrelieved
by the bright birds of the lowlands, when on the flat places
tired cattle forage miles for their supper.
Some hard wind of war has swept
the tan stone villages bare. Herders of sheep and cattle,
artisans, bakers of flat breads, small traders,
people with long deep roots in the stony soil-
when war snapped them loose they blew all the way to Damascus.
There they wait, in camps behind tall wired fences,
for another great wind to blow them back again.
They wonder at how little they weigh in the world.
And their cattle-their milk and meat,
their very sandals to bear them over the rocks-
impervious to rumor, too dull to run,
after all outweigh their masters and remain at home.
But blown by the same fierce wind that tumbled the others,
new masters squat on the prairie.
Milder in the valley, gusts uprooted
only these lightweight ones, the young and thoughtless,
already halfway into the air with pride.
In the green nave of the valley, raised near the sound of waters,
surrounded by the fruit and flowers of their parents' toil,
these sprouts were haunted.
Always they peered at the highlands, felt watched and blind.
In the pride of their imaginations it was they
who would watch from the heights. In their hearts' calculus
all factors faded under the edge that overlooked them,
that frozen wave of rock, a step up in the world.
Toward what, or what the next step might be,
they couldn't see or care. When the wind came,
they spread wings of longing and coasted up.
Now they are here. They look down at their natal valleys,
around at stubble. The cattle are their cattle.
It was the space they conquered. They did not conquer
the people, never met, can't imagine them.
One drunk old man remained, weighted by stupor.
Now he sells canned goods he found abandoned,
trades in sign language, bobs and grins.
He is granted the respect due the insane.
The new masters choose clean spaces.
They avoid the empty villages,
build tin huts or use old army barracks.
The soldiers were Russian. Transients do not haunt.
The wind shattered all the glass in the one large town;
the streets sparkle. A child's rubber sandal, splintered chairs.
no one will live here again but the madman.
Of all this, the cattle only know
their new masters bully them like the old, but ineptly.
They wander farther before men track them down.
Sauntering forth at daybreak from Spartan huts,
the settlement cowboys bus to the ranch for breakfast.
Their old army van's the noisiest thing in miles,
jolting on roads built hastily by the British.
The young men hold on silently, watching
the few colors wake on the desert plains.
Breakfast is boiled black coffee, scrambled eggs,
jokes with the cook and rougher jokes with each other.
Outside, the tough little horses stamp and blow.
Then more rituals: smoothing on saddle blankets,
kicking the horses' bellies to tighten the girth.
Now the brief sadness of going separate ways:
they are few, the cattle many, and the plains wide.
The cattle are a losing venture, too stringy to sell.
The settlement diner supports the ranch. Every male worker
longs to be a cowboy.
In the fields and kitchens, each one waits his turn.
They go without new coats to pay for the time
Brahma bulls are imported to improve the herd.
These gallants are guarded at night like any harem,
and led at dawn in stately pearl-grey pageant
out to some waiting cows not half their size.
Things go wrong at once. They need help mating.
As the fall chill deepens, pneumonia strikes the bulls.
The cows' knees buckle from the growing weight in their wombs.
By spring all the bulls will die, and most of their mates.
The few survivors birth by Caesarean section
and are too weak to nurse their over-sized young.
The settlers postpone new boots to pay for the birthings
and three pet calves with humps on their small backs
reproach them: you pushed too hard, too fast.
In the villages, untended roses
have reached their splendid, fragrant bloom again.
All summer, what food the gardens volunteered
was eaten by birds and shy four-footed things
still watching for those whose loss
was their small gain.
Those gardeners have not gone far, but only receded.
They know when the army patrols. Some nights
the old masters, sneaking up
with familiar movements, persuade the cattle
the shortest distance between square meals
lies across the border.
In the morning, the cowboys miss a dozen or thirty.
For a while, the patrols double, and the raids cease.
To the cowboys, what is being stolen
is not meat or sandals but
their mastership, the illusion of peace in war.
When raiders are caught, they learn
to expect no quarter.
Imagine you are a bee among the last roses
on a bush mulched by rubble and broken glass.
Imagine you're a hawk, circling an old foundation.
In the end of things
there is good hunting.
Roses into wildflowers. Houses into grass.
