Looking at the historical marker
before the stout stone church,
describing the Underground Railroad
in raised gold serif,
was like looking down the hole
in the ground in Gaza. I’d stood
before a smuggling tunnel,
knowing men died carrying chocolates
and cigarettes and cancer medicine
and antidepressants and boner pills
and tampons and a leather jacket from Cairo
for the son of a man with power.
A communist doctor named Saeed,
who convinced me that it was obscene to live
in a large home, took the smugglers up
on their offer to climb down a rope
and crouch fifty feet into the tunnel
for a sense of the danger.