The olive trees
were wiped out parcel by parcel,
you may have noticed, sucking the pit
out of a people
broken and spread
across a butcher block.
What will become of the sweet
creatures of the olive trees, the sweet
sweet ladies who tend them?
A family mourns
groves of livelihood.
Tending them in autumn
when the bulbs burst
from heavy branches
turning the atmosphere fragrant as oil.
Pruning them, doting upon
even the smallest leaf—a sign
of something living.
And I tell you this: Palestinian bodies
may stretch from one edge of the earth
to the other—an aunt in Honduras,
one in Texas—
meanwhile a woman carries a basket
into the final field of her nation.