THE KITE FLIERS

When kites fly 
across blue skies
and border divides,

Gaza and Israel unite.

We make the kites,

we fly the kites, 

over the wells of hate.

We carve the sails,

we choose the colours for the tails;

in ribbons of orange and red and green -

we speak across the steel.

When we fly kites

across blue skies,

Gaza and Israel unite.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2023

In 2011, when I watched the Dispatches documentary on the Children of Gaza, I wrote two poems. The first was for a little girl named Amal, who was nine years old, and suffering terrible migraines from the shrapnel in her head. The second was about the kite flying festival set up along the border, to foster some kind of fun and relief for Palestinian children. A competitive spirit with Israeli children followed, but years later, members of both Hamas and the IDF, grown men, used kites to set fields and warehouses alight. There was an escalation. People died, including a 15 year old Palestinian teenager. The festival was in danger of being cancelled. 

Moments after I had located this second poem, I learnt that last Saturday, the 7th of October, the Israeli family who were responsible for setting up this year’s kite flying festival, were shot by Hamas. Their kibbutz was on the border. My friend, the writer Joanne Limburg, tells me, ‘It is better to have a breakable heart than a hard one.’ So I, we, must find a new way to hope.

SUNFLOWERS

The sunflowers my mother bought
wept over the kitchen floor 

this morning, their scent overpowering - 

wet carpets, mothballs.

 

Or something older, an odour

too close to human, for comfort.

A flower seems such a harmless thing,

stuck in a painted vase,

petals shaking off at the lightest touch,

or no touch at all.

And yet, I am driven far away, 

wanting nothing more of their glorious black,

the gold I sought - only days ago,

when my mother brought them home. 

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2023

Paintings: Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

OLN night at DVerse Poets