“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
         Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
         is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
                        —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden


I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

Lovers of asparagus, alive
as hummingbirds, place their nostrils
over a low cloud, wet of air.
It’s the year of green hills
in California that early spring;
the evening is blue-split between the first
snow on the mountain top,
and a computer screen, where news of a man
whose body is eating itself, scythes
the long-stemmed breaths in the room.
“Do not weep if my heart fails,” he writes.
“I am your son.”

    Gate of Love

Son I have. Your hands bulge
with pear tree blossoms.
You are bellow and sweat,
hunger and bread.
I part the fog to find you
through a grimy crowd of kids.
Before you give in to the affection
that soils you in public,
I’ll promise you a truce.

    Gate of the Sun

Bristling down the chemical-
scraped hall uttering
assalamu alaikums to the young
patients from the UAE, their heads sagging
to the side, their bodies a shrine
to tumors, husks of overgrown cells,
the chemo fountain. One boy
stares through a sieve
of darkness, hewn around dark-gray clouds.

    Gate of Peace

“I have so many sons withering,”
I whisper to the Chinese elm, as news
of the man whose body is eating itself,
disputes with the bresola on crisp baguette
that I’m eating in a garden

among the flung-out
blue jays and limping Daddy long legs.
No hymns left;
only a small neck
the sun gnarls through.


About this poem:
“The poem was inspired by Palestinian hunger striker Samer Issawi’s moral fortitude in the face of draconian detention. The rapid growth of children, the mediocrity and spontaneity of springtime, and a diminishing mother’s role in her child’s life are juxtaposed against larger tragedies such as death from disease and death from hunger.” Today (Monday 11th March 2013) is Samer’s 224th day on hunger strike.

(Source: poets.org)

We left Ramallah early and sped north to the Salem military court for the hearings of Ashraf Abu Rahma, Wahib Qadus, and Diaa Beni Odeh. The court adjoined the prison of the same name, a dull and rainy sprawl of chainlink, razor wire and concrete blast walls. We passed through gates and metal detectors and turnstiles and tiny private rooms designed for more intrusive searches. But before I tell you what happened in the courtroom, I should mention that I was there when the three men (two men really—Diaa Beni Odeh is just 17) were arrested on a hillside  above the village of Burin. I don’t have room to tell you here how gorgeous the view from that hillside was or to describe the green terraced fields in the valleys all around because all of this is already a week old, maybe more, old news already, and by the time we arrived in Salem, Qadus was already all over YouTube, getting beaten and pepper-sprayed by Israeli soldiers as they held him on the ground. You see how one story leads to another and that one to another and another and in the end none of them ever fully gets told? The previous Saturday I had arrived in Burin an hour or so before a tractor pulled up in the center of the village towing nine steel-framed, semi-cylindrical, aluminum “huts.”  The idea was to haul them up the mountain and with them establish a new “village” called al-Manatir—the name refers to the traditional Palestinian stone huts built to provide shelter for farmers and shepherds guarding their fields and flocks. The symbolism was intentional: the land in question was under threat from the nearby Israeli settlements of Har Brakha and Yitzhar and the even nearer outpost of Givat Ronen. The settlers around Burin are among the most aggressive in the West Bank, but those stories are better told elsewhere, because we have a court date to get back to and we’re four days behind and still haven’t made it to the top of the hill. We got there eventually and the huts did too, twenty or so people carrying each one all the way up the steep and rocky slope, cheering and chanting as they lowered each hut into place. Soon the settlers in their flowing white robes were racing down from the outpost on the next hilltop up and dozens of green-uniformed soldiers were running a few steps behind them. In the end Al-Manatir only survived for a few hours, but they were long ones, and my ears were still ringing the next morning. I will tell you about one moment from that day, a moment I didn’t remember until much later that night, and then laughed about on and off for days. The soldiers had been steadily pushing us—150-odd protesters and journalists—back with tear gas and stun grenades all morning and we had all been gassed and shoved repeatedly when I saw the soldiers lifting their guns and reaching for grenades again and I pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth and pressed my hands to my ears and ran to take cover beside a low stone wall where a man whose face I didn’t see—I only ever saw the shoulders of his brown leather jacket—suddenly pulled me to him and threw his arms around me. I don’t know if he was trying to protect me or to comfort himself—it’s even possible that I was the one who reached out to him, I can’t say for sure in the haze, but either way I returned his embrace and he returned mine and we crouched there with our heads pressed into each other’s shoulders, holding tightly to one another until the explosions ceased and the gas had drifted off and we stood and parted, slightly abashed, without a word or a glance. Oh fierce and mighty IDF, do you not know how much tenderness you breed? The day dragged on until the soldiers pushed us to a cliffside and we scrambled all the way down and learned at the bottom that settlers had in the meantime attacked the village and shot a 17-year-old boy in the thigh, and I almost forgot to mention that in the process the soldiers arrested Abu Rahma, Qadus, and Beni Odeh, not, as far as I could tell, for any reason other than that they had annoyed them and were within easy reach. I was right there when they took Abu Rahma, whom I had met in Ramallah a few days earlier at a screening of the documentary Five Broken Cameras, which includes footage of his brother Bassem being killed by a high-velocity teargas canister fired at his chest, but does not mention his sister Jawaher’s death from teargas inhalation eight months later. In Burin that Saturday morning, I had seen Abu Rahma yelling at the soldiers, but I had not seen him raise a stone or a fist against them. And at the military court in Salem—you see, I promised we’d get back here—Abu Rahma’s case was first. His wife Rana, to whom he had been married just three months, sat on the bench beside me, her eyes huge and rimmed with tears. The judge came in, a fair-skinned young man in his thirties, his cap folded neatly into his left epaulette. We stood and sat down again. Abu Rahma grinned at his wife from across the room. The translator slumped in his seat. A pot-bellied soldier with an M-3 strapped over his shoulder leaned against the wall. The prosecutor wore diamond earrings with her fatigues. Her nails were manicured with perfect French tips. Every now and again a soldier too young to shave would sit down beside her, whisper a few words, linger, leave. Across the room, Abu Rahma squirmed in his shackles. The prosecutor presented secret evidence. Secret from the defendant, that is. And from his lawyer, and the public. Abu Rahma shouted out that he had something to say. His lawyer hushed him. In the end, basing his decision on the secret evidence presented, the judged granted the prosecutor’s request that Abu Rahma be detained for another five days without charge. (Five days later, he would grant her request for another three days’ extension). The next two cases proceeded in the same manner. The judge instructed the clerk to cut and paste his earlier decision into the official record. We walked back out through the security checks and the razor wire to the drizzle and the car. We drove west for lunch in an old stone house in Nazareth and crossed over again into the West Bank and headed east and then south through the Jordan Valley, the hills lush with winter rain. Some of us, you see, have been blessed with the right documents and skin tone and are hence allowed to pass through checkpoints and borders as freely as the birds fly over them. I don’t say this smugly, but with great sadness and a certain amount of wonder that I have at last arrived at the story I’ve wanted to tell you all this time—not about military courts or prisoners or checkpoints or settlers or teargas or beatings or the man who hugged me, but about the birds, the thousands and thousands of birds we saw in the dim sky and in the trees on the side of route 90 when we pulled off the road just before the sun set beneath the green hills that rim the Jordan Valley. There were white cranes and black birds I didn’t recognize, flocks intermingling as they migrated from Central Asia down to Africa and stopped on the way here in these trees, so many birds that the branches looked heavy with white and black fruit and sometimes the sky went dark as they swirled and dove above us and the valley rang out with their calls and cries and flirts and worries and with the beating of their thousands of wings and the push of the air against their bodies and we stood beneath them, silenced, heads back, open-mouthed, unable to find anything to say.

Protest against the occupation and settlements, Nabi Saleh, West Bank, 30.11.2012 (by activestills)

let me teach you how we do math where i am from:

for example did you know
that a hunger striking prisoner
is cancelled out
by some kids throwing rocks
at praying people?

(don’t worry, nobody died this time).

when you divide the land
by everyone who claims it,
the answer is blood.

(and remember
that it is always the people
who have power
who draw the line
of the division symbol.)

here is your pop quiz,
like everything else it takes you by surprise.

(don’t worry too hard though,
here we always
round off the remainders).

how many walls
do you have to build
to feel safe
in your stolen house?

how many bombings
equal a wall?
how many night raids
curfews
and lost family members
equal a burning bus
on a busy street in tel aviv?

how many refugees?
how many refugees?
how many refugees?
how many more refugees?

what is the number worth of a screaming mother a farmer cut off from land a sister in prison?
how many days of hunger until you are free?
how many kilometers to the ocean in jaffa from ramallah?
how many minutes hours days years lifetimes in between?

how many bodies
did you count and
what kind were they
(civilian or militant) and
who gets to decide
if they matter or
cancel each other
out?

ipayrenttothedunya:

“She carries bones in bags under eyes… For Gaza, I’m sorry Gaza I’m sorry Gaza, she sings, for the whole powerless world. Her notes pitch-perfect, the bell a death toll.”

Suheir Hammad: 4. Jabalya (by Palfest)

thatonesuheirhammad:

this reflection of subtraction

discounted life pressed to spin

 

all ready know what cease fire

means shock living stop all thinking 

 

imagine din grinding heads

what de-escalation means

 

families lowered ground covered

all ready been peace processed

 

means eat this salt degradation

trapped starving generations

 

never be civilian enough

genetics as terror cellular

 

fission of everything light

i am damaged beyond recovery

 

nights swallowed years tunneled into me

learned hate intimate beauty now foreign

 

all this a shell a bitch to kick when down

i know this cycle know war is come

 

i am this pattern flatten cover-up

a bed laid web someone else’s tragedy

 

history made a maze i feel beastly

chronic survival this not living

 

have absorbed more than my frame

shook am holding this spark to flame

 

gaza gaze (mirror)

suheir hammad

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
New York Times, 9/20/82
(after the 1982 Phalangist/Israeli Massacre of Palestinian Refugees in Sabra and Shatila)

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning
because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten into
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can’t get rid of it.
They throw stones, throw stones at me
In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988,
Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites,
Evil men throw and just men throw,
Sinners throw and tempters throw,
Geologists throw and theologists throw,
Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw,
Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw,
Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone,
Stones shaped like a screaming mouth
And stones fitting your eyes
Like a pair of glasses,
The past throws stones at the future,
And all of them fall on the present.
Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones,
Even God in the Bible threw stones,
Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown
And got stuck in the beastplate of justice,
And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple.

Oh, the poem of stone sadness
Oh, the poem thrown on the stones
Oh, the poem of thrown stones.
Is there in this land
A stone that was never thrown
And never built and never overturned
And never uncovered and never discovered
And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders
And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers
And never turned into a cornerstone?

Please do not throw any more stones,
You are moving the land,
The holy, whole, open land,
You are moving it to the sea
And the sea doesn’t want it
The sea says, not in me.

Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be.


Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav

(Source: poemhunter.com)

I don’t Know if history repeats itself
But I do know that you don’t.

I remember that city was divided
Not only between Jews and Arabs,
But Between me and you,
When we were there together.

We made ourselves a womb of dangers
We built ourselves a house of deadening wars
Like men of far north
Who build themselves a safe warm house of deadening ice.

The city has been reunited
But we haven’t been there together.
By now I know
That History doesn’t repeat itself,
As I always knew that you wouldn’t.

(Source: poemhunter.com)

I’ve been licking bricks and rubbing with my palms to bring the wall down.

Down to just a stone polished by sea, after a thousand years.

Occupation is not a truce.

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to
   her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
   single word: Home.

translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash

(Source: poets.org)

Relentless (by this is limbo)

thatonesuheirhammad:

did not expect mercy
wall swallows what once was hope

language in double talk wa half speak
law of hearts dashed against rock

did not expect compassion
nor retribution for life
nor redemption for love

of women’s hands reaching shook earth
of women wailing into lasting sky

expected less than before
swallowed a wall built nightly still
expected more than history



suheir hammad