Exile’s Terrarium

By Edward Salem
Do not try to take your trees with you to foreign lands
to enjoy their shade. Trees do not migrate.
—Ghada Al Samman

I’d planned a sculpture called
Getting Home, built from
my land in Palestine—
soil, shrubbery, stones,
an entire olive tree

chopped and dissected
into shippable parts
and air mailed in boxes
to my home in Detroit.

I’d use glue to piece together
the Frankensteinian tree,
drips like sap
unsuspending disbelief.

I’d assemble a patchwork garden
made of earth it’s illegal
for me to live on, a splay of rocks
half-buried in a wide bed of soil.

But what a pain to make!
Paying a cousin with Jerusalem
residency rights to shovel soil
into heavy, messy boxes;

amputate, branch by branch,
one of my beautiful olive trees;
dissect the trunk with a chainsaw,
then wrap, tape, package and lug it all

to the Israeli post office in Jerusalem,
where we’d learn to what extent
they’d exert their discretion
on allowing my land to be shipped.

Certain non-decorative artworks
render the artist an administrator,
one’s own secretary, busy
with calls and logistics.
The artistry is in the idea,
it’s all downhill from there.

I imagined how it’d be perceived
by those who work the trees
for oil and wonder
why one went missing;
or if they’d see it

as fancy, earnest—
the American who
mailed himself
a tree for love of
home. It’s halfway
colonial, taking a trophy

from a land where I wasn’t
born and leaving
a symbol of my absence.
Photos of the marred ground
would be the truer artwork—

the scalped head of the stump,
roots severed, soil scraped out.
Photos indistinguishable
from photojournalism.
You’d need a placard
to explain them,
or this poem.

Listen to a reading of Edward Salem's poem Exile’s Terrarium.

Added: Friday, August 9, 2024 / Used with permission. The poem first appeared in "Puerto del Sol." This poem published through the Poem of the Week Series is part of the Poetry Coalition's 2024 slate of programs in the spring and summer that reflect the transformative impact poetry has on individual readers and communities across the nation, and is made possible in part by the Academy of American Poets with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Edward Salem is the author of the poetry collection Monk Fruit (Nightboat, 2025). His writing appears in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Image Description: Edward Salem, a person with short black hair and a beard, is in front of a white fence. He wears a button-up shirt.

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