Ron Morita

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.