Dear Norm —
Angel, who lives next door
to my mother, asked me whether I am not too scared
to wear a beard and my kaffiyeh, these days, openly
as she warns her sons against.
I turned my blue eyes on her and said, "No."
"I tell my sons" — the veteran and
the hot-rodder — "they better not."
My mother did not understand.
Angel — you remember Angel, Norm, my brother,
the lieutenant, called your tips line that time
Washington trembled under the sniper threat, thinking
her husband has a white hardware van
with a ladder to the roof, and neither
distinguishing "arab" from Persian
(as some Americans sometimes may not),
nor knowing they are Christians like him,
not that knowledge of their putative religion
— (can arabs even be Christians, Norm?) —
would have allayed his dutiful suspicion,
but they all turned out not to be the snipers.
That time.
Norm, you recall
the American reservist and the Jamaican runaway, right?
You recall Angel, Norm — she
allowed, to my mother, as how the kaffiyeh
— my jihadi scarf — when worn by an arab,
or a person indistinguishable from an arab
to the untrained glance, might be regarded as
a political expression (more than fashion statement
or practical cold-weather apparel) of solidarity
with certain arab children with rocks, and, maybe,
met with hostility
in isolated pockets of American civilization,
so that Angel
fears for her sons’ safety
here, in the capital’s suburb.
I told them both that the photos of arrested protesters
being led away from last year’s inaugural clashes showed
the plainclothes arresting officer to be
a big blue-eyed white man in a knit cap,
a baggy, olive-drab jacket, levis, and a kaffiyeh,
just like me,
so, if I were to be mistaken for anything,
it would probably be a cop or a spy;
but they were not mollified.