The Uses of Laughter

 

Enid Dame

1.

The army is closing vegetable markets.
Chickens scatter. A boy bites a sandwich.
It looks like falafel and pita bread.

A soldier knocks it

out of his hand

as if it were dangerous.

They are kicking in doors, they are tearing

up olive trees.
That man was struck down in front of his family.
That girl was shot dead by her bodyguard.
Meanwhile, the children throw stones.

Terrible things are done in our name?
my name, and yours, which means ?heart?
in their language.
Hearts can be dangerous things
for boys in New York to carry
through schoolyards and streets. But you learned
how to joke your way out of violence,
how to make people laugh
with words aimed precisely as spitballs.

This is an ancient skill

our tribe perfected

in dark European ghettoes.

We were

a nation of stand-up comics,
lawyers, negotiators,

people who said words mattered.

Now we?re like everyone else

what do we do with history?

How do we learn to forget?

Smash all our windows and mirrors?
Seal off the door to the cellar

where memories scrabble like mice,

where words knit like bones?

2.

What does my enemy look like?

Is he that child

hurling rocks on the Evening News?
Is she that child throwing taunts

at the back of our demonstration?
We scream, ?Peace now! They scream, ?Not one inch! 
I inch back to look in her face.

It is a mirror. Behind barricades,
the daughter I chose nor to have
calls me traitor.

3.

On the way home

you and I stop to buy vegetables.

Our part of Brooklyn?s called Little Odessa
after your grandfather?s hometown.

He wore your name, played the ?ddle,

was jumped by a gang of children.

They killed him for being himself?

a Jew in the wrong place.

Now we ?nger onions and yellow squash.
I say, ?Let?s boycott Israeli tomatoes.?
You say, ?The wrong strategy!

Better tomatoes than bullets

or, for that matter, stones.?

And I picture children heaving tomatoes
at soldiers who aim water pistols

?lled with tomato juice.

The ?oors of the world grow slick

and messy. The air turns sodden.

At some point, everyone laughs.

It?s a scene from an old-time movie
the kind you played hookey to watch
when you were a funny kid

in a less dangerous time

learning the uses of laughter.

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