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.