Yusef Komunyakaa - Envoy to Palestine lyrics

I've come to this one gra**y hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet's song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the gra**es & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,” & now I know why I'd rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk