Painting by Palestinian artist Laila Shawa (R.I.P) Ode for Laila's Birds of Paradise In the garden that memory still insists is whole, drones cut through the ancient canopy. Yellow, red, pink, and blue — bright as children’s toys, they slice between the branches where peacocks spread their hundred eyes and cranes lift their necks in alarm. The old miniature world is still here: deer stepping carefully among the rocks, small figures in robes of flowing script standing like quiet witnesses, trees heavy with fruit and story. But the sky no longer belongs only to wings. Machines have entered the frame, circling the same air the birds have always claimed. This is the other side of paradise — not lost in some distant future, but invaded in the present tense. The drones do not belong to this palette, yet here they are, turning the living garden into a map someone far away is learning to read. Still the birds remain. Still the peacocks open their tails in full defiance. Still the cranes and geese and crows refuse to abandon the branches they have held for generations. Laila painted the intrusion in unbearable colour so we would see exactly what is being taken and exactly what refuses to leave. — Zara Zhar