The Olive Harvest

Hello! Hello!
Ya Haramiyye!
Allah hu Akbar!

A worn man rises swiftly from a recliner, its muted fabric dusted and torn in the dirt and soil shade of olive trees still alive amidst the discards of this broken city, a remnant orchard boxed in a Rockefeller project.

He’s upon the two women in an instant, pulling at the synthetic burlap of a bag not even half empty. Her old hands are impossibly strong. This woman banished, ventured from the camp. Her hands are rough, as rough as his. Such calluses never relinquish their utility.

He pulls with insistence,
but not violence, his anger tempered by her desperation. His case booms, right but not righteous, not framed within rules worth following. It’s a reverse mugging in Central Park East, after the sun has fallen to earth and burned our homes and skin, everything but the biblical, symbols of hope and promise.

He takes care not to offend this thief. His hands maneuver deftly around her staid grasp. He never touches her, not once, decorum beguiling, colors of our compassionate nature painting the summer faded.

They wind down. He sits and smokes. They sit and listen. In the refuge of stolen provision, his appeals steadily lose bite, a man drowned whose nervous impulses force desultory relent. Kick, spasm and twitch last appeals to the onlookers.

It’s over. He collapsed, defeated and redeemed in his recliner. They, with his scant harvest, up the slope and back to exile.

In returned silence, the police drive slowly past, obligated if not curious. They do not stop.