were ordered to the rim of their grave.

Numbed into duty, they waited their turn to step down into

the pit brimming with the dead before them. The father,

placing a hand on his daughter's head, with his other hand turned

her chin up toward his breaking face. His mother softly stroked temple hymns from her

throat into his infant's ear. Armed guards barked at the family after them to peel

away their rags. Two families

shuffled and squirmed at their

mound of earth and naked stumbled and slipped

into the ditch scarred out for them from the land.

The soldiers' guns silenced the hymn and stilled the tremors quaking

in their limbs. Sitting along the edge of the open tomb, they teased ammunition from

their stroked weapons, shattering bone, shearing muscle and brain, of the no longer

living. What has changed then, since 1941?

On this evening now, across the gulf,

the jagged light of the neighboring mountains of Jordan

shifted through oranges, reds, purples, and lastly into blues,

as the sun crimsoned the clouds above the blue mountains before disappearing.

Then, in descending darkness, a full moon grayed mountain summits, as the lights of

Eliat and Aqaba sparkled the night. The Red Sea reflected back the neon of tourist

scows. On this Shabbat, it's Eid

Al Adha in Israel. Darboukas

and the Qur'an rhymed the night air. Over campfires

along the beach, Palestinians tended to coffee and

barbecues. Jewish youths further up crooned American rock lyrics

in English and Hebrew to a strummed guitar and boombox. Why am I ambivalent?

Mostly empty near the Egyptian border, amidst the sunset of the southern beach,

an earlier flock of seagulls swooped

and soared above gently shimmering waves

lapping above a mosaic of pebbles and shells. The wildflower

sanctuary and coral reefs of the Negev had lulled us into

a moment's forgetfulness among endangered families of gazelles, eagles,

and falcons. In my sad bones and sore eyes I remembered conversations of the beauty

of the legendary, sacred land of the Marsh Arabs along the border of Iran and Iraq.

Where is Eden now? The lush

tributaries of the Euphrates

are soaked dry in executions, chemicals, and bombs.

A high court in Belgium indicts the bloodsoaked chronicles

and sadistic flowering roses of Saddam and Sharon as our nation

rattles dice in the dynastic back rooms of dismissive sighs. Blueblood presidents, like

elite generals, always gamble their war of choice. The people are never their mission

--unless they belong to someone else.

Interest and belief caress the guns.

Our nation, once a revolution in its youth, now carves

out revolt and rebellion in the world's neighborhoods.

Loudmouth demagogues splatter blindly against our nightly screens.

Politicians shield their confusing heart in battles of bombast. Fathers once pushed for

the diplomat's peace. Now sons sweep the world with an adviser's broom of war.

Our balance of power is an unbalanced Eden.

Our nation reports that we have no funds for

health and education as it negotiates aid with new Europe.

We are made poor and poorer as the military becomes rich

and wealthier in protective gear and weaponry. Our paradise needs no

protecting angel at the gate. All men are now avengers. Peace like war has never come

cheap, though the costs are not the same. Ambivalent are our blood, heart, and brain.

All dissent looms seditious to the youth

who squanders his action affirmatively,

who rebels amidst his privileged wealth along the cheerleader's

halls of unearned learning, while the people struggle for rights

more civil than the envious rivalries of slothful, covetous, guffawing boys; who

soon becomes thoughtfully tightlipped, reflecting himself in men as dull as tonguetied

bells, as the lights of libraries across our cities extinguish the joys

of books and come on again in suburban

citadels. As for the supercilious strutting

before lecture halls, the humanists dismiss objectivity

as inherently oppressive, while the scientists disparage

qualitative interpretation as mere personal opinion. We create on earth

sheer absences as we reduce and force one another into enmity. Compassion

has died. Once the very incarnation of liberation and human rights, we now