Ed Harkness: Transplanting Tomatoes Amid the Rubble of a Bombed School

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
~~William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking
above us to somewhere.
~~Adrienne Rich, “The School Among the Ruins”

tamatim – Arabic for “tomato”

___

They are newly alive,
the starts, now six inches,
fragile in their clay pots.

Traces of smoke linger
still over the ruined school.
I read the future as

a garden of glass shards
glittering in a yard
of children’s mangled swings.

Paper scraps whirl about
as if they too were once
flowers and butterflies.

Some pages are wide-lined
with Arabic letters
penciled by a child’s hand.

Here’s a charred baseball cap.
Small. On it, an emblem
for the New York Yankees.

You must bury them deep
in a rich patch of earth,
mulched, watered, tended to.

Their root balls might survive
our merciless age if
in soil with good drainage.

What you will do is place
a sign, a wooden stake
with the Arabic word

tamatim, written large
enough for the sniper,
the Merkava tank crew,

to see, to be human
once more, to hold their fire
this close to new green lives.

There are countless bodies
under collapsed school walls,
their names buried, erased.

I’ll plant tamatim here
as an experiment
to treat the wounded ground,

to learn if my seedlings
with just-formed flowerets,
will ripen into fruit

everyone has tasted,
whose name, whose tart sweetness
no tongue will ever forget.

Copyright 2024 Ed Harkness

Ed Harkness’s many books include The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat, 2018). He lives with his wife, Linda, in Shoreline, Washington.