Yeva's Choice

A market stall in Kurdistan. Source: Shafaq News

In the beginning was a choice.
In the old books, you will find
a pomegranate tree.

When I was a young pilgrim in Palestine,
Guarding God’s gardens against imaginary terrorists,
oversexed tourists,
With my Motorola HT-90 dangling in its holster,
A six-volt box-lantern weighing down an arm;
Plastic badge, poorly fit trousers,
Pockets full of hand-cut flash cards,
Head full of Sufi conjectures,
Belabored Arabic under my breath.

Come morning, I took the thousand steps
Down Carmel’s face to the Wadi
Where YEVA, our gray Armenian merchant
Stood behind her luminous pomegranates
And called them by their Armenian name,
What sounded like light in Palestinian ears,
With all the requisite mystical overtones.

Young poets would walk miles out of their way
Just to hear her call over her pregnant flowers.

Once in October I paused before her stall
and exclaimed, “noor!”
She stopped and reached over the pile
As if one had my name
and held it up to me.
I reached for my money, but she scolded.
She held it up before my eyes,
As it were an orbuculum,
a world.

She’d stood in the market for many years,
Just how many no one seemed to know —
a hundred, perhaps a thousand,
And she spoke the language of the land,
But her Armenian word was holy.
It could not abide translation. Besides,
Everyone knew she was selling pomegranates.

How she got her start there’s no telling,
But folks tell stories just the same.
They say, long ago
When the world was not so tired,
and trees weren’t objects,
She dared to pluck a pomegranate of truth
And was summarily convicted of sedition.
Yahweh Elohim, jealous for love,
jealous for obedience, jealous for loyalty,
and jealous of Yeva’s choice,
Cast her out of the garden, invented death
and called it life.

So it came to pass:
cast into a wilderness,
And in that moment we thought a lifetime,
We gazed into the desert,
ate the aril and said, Beautiful,
And knew that the world could never again be
Indifferent, that we who are condemned
to choose
Are condemned to judge.

Exiled from utopia, she took with us
Her one possession and treasure,
That pomegranate of moral discrimination,
And we planted its arils in the desert
And learned that her tree
thrives in saline soil.

But here’s the curse: the choice remains,
And every autumn,
When the pomegranate weighs down the young branch,
We must choose: the burden of knowledge,
the labor of responsibility, the cold nights of regret,
Orphaned in the wild to water new orchards
And cultivate new values,
Not to feign that we never had a choice,
to plead ignorance,
And retreat to the settlements of the abyss,
Where the only calling is consumption,
The only life-form a tumor
Whose One God is Growth.

The tree knows nothing of this,
Though her wisdom is broad and her memory is deep.
Before she was cultivated in Eden,
Before Yahweh strove against her,
Before her seed blew down from the highlands of Iran,
Where men once called her wisdom, on the sunrise.

And here at the heart of the malignant mass,
I wait out the long days and long for sleep,
Hoping that somewhere in my web of dreams
I may again find myself wandering through that Wadi,
and there, discern the beacon of her call,
O adhán of my soul.