If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have
chosen the side of the oppressor.
—Desmond Tutu

A stone pries open the fingers of a gentile
and flies off, its brain in a state of shock
when it remembers the number of times
stones have flown. The !Kung, who left
this moss on my head, used wood-pulp
to poison tips of arrows, the crude form
of warfare. A rock is a cop-out, a non-war
about the dead. The !Kung are both alive
and dead at the same time. Against an Uzi
your legs make you stand up on this land
whose gods are always angry. Your rock
on their skull and they should not want,
not this land whose name means nation
of the Philistines, and not their barbican
on Syrian heights. You are the carer of a
people’s monolith, your stone hit heads
of the dead. In the end it’s a burst of sun
that will find cracks in all the rocks, cracks
along walls at whose feet piles of stone
and shell casings find each other. The Jew
uses rocks to build new settlements in East
Jerusalem against decent and international
law. The Palestinian uses rocks to unsettle
Israel and the United States from its lands.