Yusef Komunyakaa (b.1947)

Envoy to Palestine

By Yusef Komunyakaa       

I've come to this one grassy hill

in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,

to a place a few red anemones

& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave.

A borrowed line transported me beneath

a Babylonian moon & I found myself

lucky to have the shadow of a coat

as warmth, listening to a poet's song

of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string

Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute.

I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.

The land I come from they also dreamt

before they arrived in towering ships

battered by the hard Atlantic winds.

Crows followed me from my home.

My coyote heart is an old runagate

redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota,

& I knew the bow before the arch.

I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses

& insects singing to me. My sacred dead

is the dust of restless plains I come from,

& I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth

telling me of the roads behind & ahead.

I go back to broken treaties & smallpox,

the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy

could be a reprobate whose inheritance

is no more than a swig of firewater.

The sun made a temple of the bones

of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed

& extinct animals live in your nightmares

sharp as shark teeth from my mountains

strung into this brave necklace around

my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear

saying to Judge Dundy, "I am a man,"

& now I know why I'd rather die a poet

than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.