Two Rivers and a Lemon Tree
Reflections and a poem about connection to homeland
As I sit this morning before dawn connecting with a group of writers under the guidance of writing Sherpa Julie Tallard Johnson, I challenge myself to write from a prompt she offered the week before, to write or rewrite a scene with an opposite outcome. I have been writing poetry over the last year about the horrific death and destruction in Gaza and so I wondered how I could turn those themes of the current moment around and focus on life and promise instead. What came to mind was a recent post by Sherman Alexie about the Rez where he grew up and my own connection to Palestine.
Sherman Alexie recently wondered if the two rivers—the Columbia and Spokane—that run by his childhood home on the Spokane Indian Reservation miss him. He spent most of his life away from them. His cousin asked him if he would ever live there again. Maybe he could even fulfill his role as a tribal elder if he moved back home. I write to him, “I would think the rivers also miss you. Can you really separate yourself from them?” After all, they are as much a part of him as he is of them. When he misses the rivers, it is because they are intertwined, impossible to disentangle. He grew up knowing the rivers and so they eternally flow through him.
I did not grow up in Palestine, and yet I miss Palestine in the way Sherman Alexie misses the two rivers of the Rez. Since my father is from Germany, maybe I should miss my father’s fatherland, and yet Palestine is the land that raised me. From the moment I set foot in that far off land and the family I was visiting in Gaza welcomed me as their own, the seed sprouted within me as if I for the first time was in the soil that could nourish my soul, show me who I am. I had found my way home.
So when I miss Palestine, I am missing my ability to live fully as myself. I want to put my hands in the earth again as I have before and pick the lemons from the lemon tree I planted 25 years ago in my husband’s village of Al-Jalameh in the fertile Marj ibn ‘Amer region of Palestine. That gentle tugging and release that comes once the tree matures, the symbiotic relationship between us, how many we together have fed, from my own children to the neighbors and relatives who have shared in the harvest.
Oh Lemon Tree!
By Christa Bruhn
Oh, lemon tree!
Do you remember me?
The way I gently
set you in the soil,
how my children
pressed you into
your forever home
with their feet,
how their cousins
moistened your roots,
signaling you to grow,
and as you grew
my children grew
until their tiny hands
were strong enough
to pick your fruit,
squeeze the juice
into our salads.
Now you flow
in our veins,
brighten our minds,
protect us from illness,
adorn our home
with your fragrant flowers,
your shiny leaves.
You are anchored
in the land
behind Sidi and Sitti’s house,
their love for the land
passed down to us
and we gave it to you.
Oh, lemon tree!
A friend told me
fruit trees
don’t live forever.
You are not an olive tree
that remains
anchored in the soil
for millennia
and yet you live in me
and in story.
Stories do live forever.
That is how I knew
to plant you
when I first saw you,
just a twig in a bucket.
I saw in you
what you saw in me:
our future on the land
in this place
called Palestine.
You are there
holding my place
until I can come back to you,
gently tug at your lemons.
Oh, how your branches
will delight
and your roots
hold the soil
a little tighter
and your lemons
shine a little brighter
and you will say,
I know that hand.
Welcome home!
My missing, however, is not solely my own. I have witnessed the love for the land by those who live there and the same love from those who have never even set foot in their homeland. That collective love for the land that gets passed down from generation to generation burns in each Palestinian. Just as those cut off from their land—the refugees, those in exile, even those sitting in concrete prisons, denied their right to live with dignity in their homeland—long for the land, to be able to live a full life as a Palestinian in Palestine, the land longs for them. The trees know the hands who plant them, tend to them, harvest their fruit, just as saber holds the memory of the destroyed villages so that the residents can find their way home, rebuild their homes and their lives.
I know because I can feel them calling out from the vacant hillsides whenever I drive through 1948 Palestine. They let me know because they sense that I see them, that I feel the absence of those no longer there, that I hear the unsettling silence in the absence of the voices of children who had to grow up in other places and speak other languages that never felt like home.
Why do Palestinians have to prove their connection to their homeland? Of course, Palestinians are not alone in having to fight to remain on their land. Sherman Alexie can tell you more about that historical truth in the American context. Like the ancestral lands of the Spokane Nation that once extended from what is now Washington State into Idaho and Montana.
Palestine is one of many contested or conquered places on Earth. Powerful people have redefined and renamed places across continents, making those who are of the land strangers in their own homeland. The official maps show the borders and carry the names of the winners in that battle for homeland and identity. That is why Palestinians are still fighting, challenging ongoing attempts to erase their names, their homes, their places. But there is no erasing Palestine from their hearts.