I shared my poem “Olives” this weekend at a public reading at the local library. It appears today in New Verse News. This poem was inspired by a friend who was heading to a peace initiative right before the Hamas attack. She is safe, but the world is shaken.
https://newversenews.blogspot.com
Olives
Is there anything more innocent than olives,
green and heavy on the branch,
Is there anything more peaceful than those branches,
Or more gentle than the wind chime of those leaves?
Isn’t it always the olive branch offered, between husband and wife,
between nations, the olive branch carried off to the moon, even,
coded into statue and treaty, held out with pleading arms
Noah, himself, relieved when the dove returns
with that verdant sign in its beak.
Mud receding, the return of life.
Deborah was going to pick olives this fall
a special harvest program, there, by the Mediterranean
Israelis gathering with Palestinians, Palestinians picking next to Israelis.
Round hard olives in their hands, not stones, not weapons. just olives
An effort to extract some small oily, slippery drops of justice.
And then came the news, the shock of it,
in that holy, but defiled place
and the world gasped in horror
and the olives flew off the trees
bleeding, ripped, raped, burned
and the trees fell to the ground
and hope scattered and hid.
So many wrongs
No matter from which hillside you gaze
the soil festers with pain.
Hate fueled, fertilized, continued.
Why can’t there just be olives?
Gabriella Brand 
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