Again the Occupation came for the mother-of-pearl sprawling in the sky.

Your mother said to you over the phone, the beads are falling from the sky.

We thought she meant bombs but your mother has not been in Gaza for years.

But your mother is keen. She sees Deir al Balah, knows the calling of its sky.

She has known those who did not want for you even a meagre light, and now the cloud

-strings are fraying under someone’s clean blade and they are palling the sky.

You are making za’atar and bread in an unfamiliar oven in an unfamiliar house, wading

through falling beads. The olive trees are burning, flames crawling to the sky.

There are beads in the flour and we are choking on grief and some white bastard

is tugging on the strings in the name of climbing and walling the sky.

They’ve unstrung the whole damn thing now. Throat and all. For this week’s march,

we’re bringing needles. For stitches, for stringing the beads back, only recalling the sky.

They brought the house down over their heads before learning even to mend.

And if all we do is tend, we will still owe our calling to the sky.

It was pouring beads on Christmas Eve and someone here looked me dead in the eye

to say, we haven’t had snow like this in years. But the beads kept falling from the sky.

The Occupation came knifing easy, as through the beaded curtain at a midwife’s door.

Who stood before the children, as they once struggled, flailing, against the sky?

Find your tin of needles, with years of tatreez in their weaving. The needles are small and

the sky is vast. And we tend and tend. One day again, we’ll have fallen for the infallible sky.