The Pine Trees

This poem was written by Gabrielle Spear in a 12-Month Poetry Collection Generator taught by Angel Nafis

The Jewish National Fund planted pine trees to cover up over 530 Palestinian villages demolished by Zionist forces in 1947-1948. The pine trees were intended to make the new Ashkenazi immigrants feel at home.

with every crevice desecrated

          we took root

            in your ruins

  fertilized this newborn nation

      with our breath

  call us what you must

                pioneer fantasy

              bloomed deception

            grafted indigeneity

               foliage paid in blood

but do not deny

  the mapmakers’ tact     

    who else could         bring the ransacked       to their knees

   then yank an eden                    

        from the rubble

  naturalize

extermination

                  then grow a welcome

gift in the wake

      still

  our scorched tongues betray   their cartography

making a hearth of this arid landscape

   they fear

our invasive ancestry

  the fires that vex 

our diseased chests

      for even as we disguise

      their crimes

  our embers signal

    their estrangement           

      someday

          our flames  

        won’t be contained

*

Gabrielle Spear’s collection Doorways is about the legacy of US empire viewed through the lens of her studies abroad in Rwanda and Palestine. Rooted in multiple localities and in conversation with writers such as June Jordan, Saidiya Hartman, Solmaz Sharif, Aracelis Girmay, and Susan Briante, Doorways interrogates whiteness and its volatile borders, my fraught relationship with the Catholic Church’s roots in empire, and tourism as a form of terror. In Kinyarwanda, the word “imiryango” means doors, gates, and lineages depending on the inflection and context. In this collection, nearly everyone is complicit and capable of transformative possibilities: lineage is both a site of nation building and a doorway towards solidarity, god is both the survivor of state violence and the mastermind behind it, witness is survival and surveillance at once.