Back in Jerusalem, where, once again, I have access to the internet. It’s nice, but also daunting. There’s too much to write about. Tomorrow I leave for the US. Tonight I have been listening to interviews from the past weeks. I keep coming back to my interview with Rachel Back, an Israeli poet who lives in a small Jewish village in the north of Israel, in the Galilee. Specifically I keep coming back to her reciting her poems. Below, I have attached I live on the ruins of Palestine.

Though born in the US, Rachel Back is the seventh generation of her family in Palestine. Her grandfather left there in the 1920s to seek his fortune in America, and she returned in the 1980s and lives not far from her ancestors village, which was destroyed in the Druze revolt of 1850.

She talked about living between the ruins of two villages. The village where she lives, Ya’ad, where we sat and drank lemonade and ate walnuts and raisins, used to be a Palestinian village. In 1948 the people of that village, Niyar, were evacuated from their homes in what Palestinians call the Naqba, the “catastrophe” of Israeli independence. The village was destroyed, but there are still remains of the old cemetrary. After our interview, before Rachel dropped me off at the train station in Acco, we went there. It exists on the land between the former village and the new Jewish village. Rachel told me descendents of Niyar still come to tend to the graves.

Here’s the poem:

I live on the ruins of Palestine

Slow to speech thick
of tongue quick
in anger ancient
parched
fear

In the ruins on a land
through a night
ignited

By a single
singed vision
and another
single spark

Cradled close in a charred palm
chiseled in a stonedream
carried across history

Through the dark beneath our bare
feet

Strangers all

On the ruins of Palestine