Palestinian Land Speaks for Itself

Madronna Holden

she/her

“It is a pear tree. It deserves to live”

--Palestinian elder clearing away the rubble of a bomb from a small tree

In the long dream

of a Palestinian state

the fruit tree speaks

in the language of shade

that would rescue this land

from its human heat.

The olive orchard sustains

the house of generations,

filling the jar of Palestinian days

with their sweet juice--

speaking to their human kin

with the tenderness

of all green things.

The land intones

the perfume of a flower—

the ripeness of a fig—

as it roots in the terraces

compiled stone by stone—

ancestor by ancestor--

over hills that remember

the names of their people.

Madronna Holden's work was awarded the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Award. Over seven dozen of her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Verse Daily, the Bitter Oleander, Cold Mountain Review, Valley Voices and the Christian Science Monitor. Her poems written as duets with the watercolors of David Wolfersberger have appeared in Puerto del Sol, the Slippery Elm Literary Review, The Santa Clara Review, About Place, the Chestnut Review and more. She authored the chapbook Goddess of Glass Mountains.