Snooker in Rishon LeZion

Sometimes - not very often - I write poems. They lie around unread for the most part although this one, written in 2002 and inspired by this event, was published in a travelling exhibition. Sadly, it remains timely. It's called:

Snooker in Rishon LeZion

Hanif blessed the martyrs one by one,
His gristled brothers bathed in perfumed flesh,
Beyond the rubbled, choking Jenin slums,
Bulldozed, blasted, soused in manic hate
For shops and glass and shining steel,
And burnished bargain counters selling dreams
Of Nike, Coke, Mercedes-Benz
And hanging Cotswold gardens, sauna clean.

His sister kissed his neck and finger-stroked,
The adolescent down above his lip,
She tucked the wiring underneath his shirt,
And out of sight she hid the plastic switch
Assembled in Taiwan and dispatched just-in-time
To unionised assembly plants in German towns
Surmounting crusty layers of wartime waste,
Creating penance work for muscled sons.

But not the life of Masefield’s galley home,
Of strutting peacocks, ivory and wine,
More the drudge-like state of Kurusawa’s Ikiru
Where cancer-riddled paper-shifting slaves awaited death,
And not like Tel Aviv’s uncertain crowds
With cue arms poised, their worries lost in play,
A green baize veil across their painful world,
Horizons fixed on cushioned rubber walls.

Koranic verse begins to warm his parching lips,
And bare-armed virgins beckon, chins thrown back,
Forbidden sisters dancing in the mist,
As others danced beneath in strobe-flicked rooms,
Their animated gestures clasped in narrowed time
For one more gambled coin and empty chugging breath
Of life as Hanif cries his mother’s name,
And sends this new Gomorrah straight to Hell.