Beige

Some cities are beige in unexpected ways.

Hotel showers spit grit and lizards.

In tailored ecru and fawn, the policemen

vogue under flyovers with speed guns.

Skips fill with scrap and hollow cats.

Sand drifts behind chained embassy gates.

Flags inside are folded for another go

when this state of mild panic passes over.

At night, cars howl around the ring road

like animals in the last circus on Earth.

The gas tank sedatives are wearing off.

Check points have popped up at the exits.

Each morning, Hammad makes my coffee

with cardamom and a sprig of mint

in a glass on the same rickety corner table

where taxi drivers stop by for a smoke.

Barbers recontest last night’s football.

We haven’t seen a drop of rain since Eid.

Watch how some cities can turn to powder

at the touch of a button.

Over the border, a reporter files the news

rebranded for unbelievers as BBC Verified.

She calls a cloud that is beige a ‘light haze’

rather than a choking shroud

suspending particulates of rubble,

flesh, shoes, screams, curtains, melamine

glass, prayers, comic books, kisses, bone,

birthdays, lullabies and photographs.

A light haze like a summer day in England

with little more than cricket breaking out

and a pause in hostilities by the boundary

for tea and sandwiches.

A light haze that has jagged on raw

jawed ruins beyond the pity of even

wind and rain. Beyond stalled

trucks of food and aid.

A light haze for a late December day

some still call the Feast of the Innocents

when a different Galilee Division

stole into Bethlehem.

‘Innocent’ is triggering language

to use at this time, says the press officer.

That nobody believes reports anymore

without independent corroboration.

That anyone can cross the border south

at any time if they are without blame,

in possession of the correct paperwork

and unconnected to any suspects.

Hammad’s teaching me a little Arabic.

On my till receipt, he writes نفس.

‘Nafas’ meaning breath, or sigh, or soul,

or carnal desire, or merely an instant.

It all depends on where you call home.

Published in The Madrid Review and The Friday Poem.