By Mark Fiddes

Some cities are beige in unexpected ways. 

Hotel showers spit grit and lizards. 

In tailored ecru and fawn, the policemen 

vogue under flyovers with speed guns. 

Skips fill with scrap and hollow cats. 

Sand drifts behind chained embassy gates. 

Flags inside are folded for another go 

when this state of mild panic passes over. 

At night, cars howl around the ring road 

like animals in the last circus on Earth. 

The gas tank sedatives are wearing off. 

Check points have popped up at the exits. 

Each morning, Hammad makes my coffee 

with cardamom and a sprig of mint  

in a glass on the same rickety corner table 

where taxi drivers stop by for a smoke. 

Barbers recontest last night’s football. 

We haven’t seen a drop of rain since Eid. 

Watch how some cities can turn to powder  

at the touch of a button. 

Over the border, a reporter files the news 

rebranded for unbelievers as BBC Verified. 

She calls a cloud that is beige a ‘light haze’  

rather than a choking shroud 

suspending particulates of rubble, 

flesh, shoes, screams, curtains, melamine 

glass, prayers, comic books, kisses, bone,  

birthdays, lullabies and photographs. 

A light haze like a summer day in England 

with little more than cricket breaking out  

and a pause in hostilities by the boundary  

for tea and sandwiches. 

A light haze that has jagged on raw  

jawed ruins beyond the pity of even  

wind and rain. Beyond stalled  

trucks of food and aid. 

A light haze for a late December day 

some still call the Feast of the Innocents 

when a different Galilee Division 

stole into Bethlehem. 

‘Innocent’ is triggering language 

to use at this time, says the press officer. 

That nobody believes reports anymore 

without independent corroboration. 

That anyone can cross the border south 

at any time if they are without blame, 

in possession of the correct paperwork 

and unconnected to any suspects. 

Hammad’s teaching me a little Arabic. 

On my till receipt, he writes نفس. 

‘Nafas’ meaning breath, or sigh, or soul, 

or desire, or merely a moment.  

It all depends on where you call home.