Moon at Half Past Noon

On the eastern ridge, Rami watches the kitchen wall
for the crack that never stays filled.
His mother smooths a dress creased from the last move,
counts the tea glasses, wraps each in a sheet of Al-Ayyam,
trying to wrap a living room inside a cardboard.
His tears have blurred the shape of his grandfather’s village,
but knows the knock of a limestone rock—
the way its chalky edge bites the skin
of a twelve-year-old palm.

Two hundred yards west, behind the reinforced glass,
Hannah strips her rifle in the dark.
Breach, clear, lock, load.
She crossed the Atlantic for a promised green,
but sleeps with her boots laced on occupied chalk.
After shift, she sweeps the tower floor,
chasing the gray dust over the lip.
Each wind-rattled of chime tightens her jaw.

The bakery’s oven is full of ash.
No one kneads the dough. Instead, older boys
trade the scuffed ball’s hollow thud
for the cotton-mouth stillness of a foil blister,
sucking the bitter alprazolam to drown the rotor-whine—
it doesn’t silence the sky, just pitches it lower,
a dentist’s drill through wet cotton,
until the rubble’s edges turn to wool.

At dusk, the muezzin’s cry rakes the diesel exhaust
idling from the jeep. Five times, the earth hitches.
Rami’s mother pauses, her hand floating over a glass,
as if the note could wrap what the newspaper cannot—
the acre her father walked before the surveyors came.

A stone leaves a hand—not Rami’s, a boy farther down.
The reply isn’t a click but a wet slap
against corrugated tin. The radio hisses a code-sign.
Hannah’s finger stays still; the floodlight gouges
a white crater into the dark.

By dawn, the cartographers stretch their tapes. Three inches west.
The surveyor kicks a green sliver of glass.

It is Rami who finds the green sliver, later,
still nested in its newsprint.
His mother sweeps plaster from the dress.
He holds out the limestone—still whole, still chalky.
She takes it. Not to throw.
Just to feel the grain against her thumb,
the only boundary she can still weigh,

…while the tower’s broom keeps up its dry scratch
and the line, somewhere, moves on without them.