Helpers By Summer Awad

The Rising Phoenix Review

June 1

Helpers

We are useless at this harvest. The olives
are too green, they tell us, hard and bitter,

not quite time. Volunteers, we think ourselves,
donning red hats and black shirts with outlawed

Arabic, uniforms for photo op. We wield plastic
rakes, rain premature fruits onto tarps, the collective

thuds like gentle hail. I climb the tree, ditch the rake
for fingers, more authentic this way, more rooted.

I can feel my Tetah, as if she's sitting beneath the tree,
cutting tomatoes into salad while the men and children

wrestle the branches. My Seedo, telling jokes, wrinkles
around his eyes, sipping dark Turkish coffee. I bite

into an olive to believe its bitterness, put it in my pocket.
Today Israeli settlers stabbed an olive picker

in another village, Westerner like us, helper.
Does our presence protect or betray? A buzzing

yellow stick moves into my branches, farmer
on a ladder, technology over tenacity. He knocks down

all the zeitoon I missed, and I am rendered obsolete.
Our hosts don't need our hands, this exercise

more for us than for them, instilling in us the muscle
memory of this land. We will be long gone

when they ripen, when the presses flow with liquid
gold, when the real business begins. But I have an olive

in my pocket, and I saw my ancestors today,
and I will tell about it – all of it – when I return.

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By Summer Awad

Biography:

Summer Awad calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to unconditional US support for Israel. Summer is a Palestinian-American poet, essayist, and playwright from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a third-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. She received a 2023 LANDO Grant for migration and immigration writing from the de Groot Foundation. Her poems have most recently appeared in Adi Magazine and her nonfiction in J Journal.