Your response, Capt., is a poem in itself. I am humbled. I had written this poem 2 days after arriving back in the US. I wanted to suspend the memory of my war experience. The sound of airplanes still felt oppressive, though I knew they were passenger planes landing in the airport nearby.

The title was inspired by this lone rose, which I found blooming late-season in Ramallah, unaffected by tension gripping the town's human inhabitants. It's very existence, feeble as it is among the pervasive stone towers, is a triumph - an act of Sumoud.