Our Homeland
Once, beyond the Wall
White olive blossoms clustered
Beside stone houses
Where high-pitched laughter rose.
Now, pine forests hide
Tree stumps and rubble
In the land once ours
Whose name we may not speak.
A boy of five,
Embroidered yarmulke over sandy hair,
Spits on my sister
And calls her a cockroach.
Tall Settlement teenagers
Uproot grandfather’s garden
And when he protests
Beat him with sticks.
You Americans
Who worship them as heroes
Should know why we despise
The Master Race.
Ron Morita is a former electronic circuit design engineer living in Northern California. His fiction appeared in The Chamber Four Literary Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and other magazines and is forthcoming in Pleiades. He attends the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and author Lisa Locascio’s class at Mendocino College. You can view his stories on his website.