I could tell you that listening is made for the ashen sky, and instead of the muezzin’s voice, which lingers     like weeping at dawn, I hear my own desire, as I lay my lips against my mother’s cheek.

I kneel down beside her, recalling her pleas the day she flung open the gates of her house     for children fleeing from tanks.

My mother is from Gaza, but what do I know of the migrant earth, as I enter a Gazan rooftop and perform ablutions in the ashen     forehead of sky? As my soul journeys and wrinkles with homeland?

I could tell you that I parted with my mother at the country     of skin. In the dream, my lips were bruised, her body was whole again, and we danced   naked in the street.

And no child understands absence past the softness     of palms.

As though it is praise in my father’s palms as he washes my mother’s body in the final ritual.

As though it is God’s pulse that comes across her face and disappears