An Ode to Poppies and Yarrows

Trigger Warnings: death and violence associated with living under occupation. 

Hello Patroclus.

I'm sorry I can only give you taboon bread as an offering; the birds will get to it before you can, but I hope you don't mind that. Their soft flittering wings and their songs humming around your grave must be a welcome sound amidst the silence. 

Pat. Ro. Clus.

Forgive me but the curl of the C and the twist of the T cuts across my teeth in a way that is pleasantly foreign to me. 

Did you like it when Achilles whispered your name between the bedsheets as the waves lapped outside your courtyard, or did you prefer when he bellowed your name across the battlefield, commanding legions and gods and mortals but still shouting your name like a desperate prayer? Eons later, there is no horse and carriage and spears, but carpet bombs, and poisoned river ways, and artillery fire and we're still fighting over displaced land and lines on a map.

My own beloveds’ name was Halimah. 

Hah. Li. Mah. 

We met standing in line to collect wheat and cooking oil. I was 15, the oldest child, and her, 16, the eldest daughter. Her older brother, Mahmoud, had left home at 17 to join the armed resistance against the settlers and hadn't returned home, neither in a body bag or as a veteran. I hope he is venturing in the fields and mountains, free and revelling in boyhood, just as you and Achilles did under Chirons’ tutelage. I'm not sure what would be worse —chained and naked in a settler prison with an empty rice bag over his face, or being reduced to a tangle of flesh and arteries in a ditch somewhere far from home. 

I remember the smile the foreign humanitarian worker had given me, demure and courteous, and the butchered way he talked to me in my language as he handed over the rations. If I had tilted my head just the slight, the parcels he was handing over looked like the packages of artillery and weaponry traded to the settlers, and any polite gratitude would dissipate into the stoic motion of heaving supplies of survival over my shoulder. 

When we approached her front door, I remember the mischievous smirk she threw over her shoulder as if she relished in watching me watch her walk away, as if I wouldn't see her at the local mosque the next jummah, as if I wouldn't asked for her hand in marriage three years later. We didn't bear any children — unheard of in my family of dozens and in a culture of lineage and duty. When prodded, Halimah would chuckle and say that, with my twisted and mangled leg from the fallout of a settler raid and the explosion of shrapnel a few years earlier, I'd be falling over and breaking every dish in the kitchen trying to chase a crawling baby. 

We'd laugh and later on, as she massaged oil into the still aching scar, we'd talk about what we'd name our child after we migrate. Something Western to fit in? Or an Arabic name that honoured our generations of strife? Halimah was trying to study to become a nurse, difficult when checkpoints steal hours of your day or when electricity gets cut off and you're studying in candlelit darkness. 

I was still working the vegetable market when I got the news.  Halimah had been coming home from her placement at the local, run down clinic, when she was stopped at a checkpoint. 

I can't remember all the details — my ears had become static by then— but Halimah was shot; one, two,  three,

a laugh, a heckle and 

a thud on the floor.

An uncle two neighbourhoods over said she was cornered against the wall, her clothes ripped and her school books tumbling out of her bag. My Halimah being made small and taut, as if she wasn't a spillage of life and laugh and dedication. 

I can't close my eyes without imagining her empty eyes and blood, bones, and flesh. I can't decide if I'm envious or pitiful of Achilles. At least he was able to hold your bloody body  and at least he was able to enact his fury and devotion to you by ravaging Hector, ripping his body apart and  any chance of its spiritual salvation. The settlers say there is no body to give back, no Halimah exists in life or death, but we know and we remember. 

I'm sorry for my rambles,  Patroclus, I am drunk on melancholy. Let me ease your soul in its lonely torment. 

Achilles, Achilles, Achilles.

Halimah, Halimah, Halimah.