Ordinary Grief
by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
(translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah)
I loved you, my love,
there’s no doubting or denying it,
no justification or synopsis,
there isn’t even a story behind it.
It was a collision.
The stairway was rising,
the heavens descending,
and the roads had softened.
I loved you, my love,
as words gather in a poem
and remain forever,
immortal, true, and quotable.
And just as death ceases to be
a logo of end or separation,
I loved you for life
to become elegant, dignified,
useful, for the seasons
to succeed one another,
rhythmic and precise,
for cruelty to rationalize
our capacity to resist, endure.
There’s no doubt or denial.
Look at them, my sighs
as they rise for twenty years.
And check my gaze that recognizes
you in an instant
whenever you pass in a breeze,
look at them as they break
over sidewalks and king-size beds,
and you’ll know, my love,
that I loved you
without evidence,
motive, or demand.
GHAZAL 1
by Deema Shehabi
If I die, leave the balcony open
—Federico García Lorca
Feet, young and old, tumble by then flee when the balcony opens,
but what about the house that seethes when the balcony opens?
Angels with daggers march through the funeral air of burned
children, and you’re in the witness seat when the balcony opens.
I want to watch those voluptuous watermelons prune the ash,
says one angel, so for God’s sake keep clear when the balcony opens.
We can’t defend this pillow plump with insults, so we beat it down
before the jasmine convenes when the balcony opens.
Without the soil in Palestine, I’m bereft of planting,
soil of succulent green beans, wildly fleeting when the balcony opens.
The hour of magic cats dressed in lavender draws near;
look toward the horizon and halt your weave when the balcony opens.
Says Ondaatje: my love, punctual in green silk, brushes my face
with cinnamon and blurs it into my cheek when the balcony opens.
Let’s double the batch of thyme bread before its scent pierces the earth,
before the dead hunger-heave when the balcony opens.
O brother, why not enter this room solidly with our right foot, ignoring
our torturers, as we fall to our knees when the balcony opens?
Transcendent poet, how will you tiptoe past a walled-in nation
that tramples the lapis lazuli when the balcony opens?
Pain dominates, says the father, but your smile bargains with that devil,
and lightens loads for dreams when the balcony opens.
My sister ruffles the sky, cries the boy in the jeep, and my brother lies motionless
beside me, but my body will burst into stream when the balcony opens.
O’ love, the length of your rib cage is my given fortune. Look
how the twilight disrobes as I measure your needs when the balcony opens.
from And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring
by Mira Mattar
bird lungs burn
tiny sleeps the
elevator brain
cords shaft & tremble
city razed again
dream incubated luxuries
blaze & gasp & char
of library kids of Beita
dazzle settlers
with fires flares & lasers
headlights phone torches
stripe their nights to
sleepless mirrors
hallucinating nation
*
inessential
dream to be
‘Palestinian’ is
a position no
an orientation no
it is the whole
compass no
it is the stars
themselves no
it is the way
I’m going no
it is the way
to go no
it is the way
to stay no
it is the way
*
blue wolf
watches
every dream
spoon melt
& twist
the sun
within its
hollow bowel
to madness
no rest
inside what
watches
no sleep no
sleep my
darlings
Punctum/Metaphor
by Carolina Ebeid
Love remains a kind of present tense. This is how we describe the scenes in photographs—as though the actions in them were still happening. My father is throwing a rock in this picture. My father keeps lions in his chest & they rip apart a gazelle in this picture.
A man throwing a rock; the image holds an old grammar. This rock has yet to leave the hand, to measure the horizontal span from A to B. Nor has it completed the vertical distance from first line to last line, riding a tangle of syntax. The photograph captures a skirmish in the West Bank town of Nablus; the man hurling the rock is my father insofar as Juliet is the sun.
The Best Way to Give Roses
by Yahya Ashour
My father never gave a bouquet of roses
to my mother,
he gave her rose seedlings.
PORTRAIT OF ME AS BREAD BAKING IN JERUSALEM
by Summer Farah
I WAS THERE! I WAS THERE! I WAS ALWAYS
THERE! A BALL OF DOUGH INFLATING
UPON THE SAJ UNTIL IT FALLS INTO WARMTH.
I WAS THERE! A BREAKFAST LAID OUT UNDER THE
OLIVE TREES AFTER AN EARLY MORNING HARVEST.
I WAS THERE! FILLED WITH SALTY CHEESE WHILE
FISH BOB FOR WATERMELONS IN THE ICY LAKE.
THERE, BY THE CHURCH IN ICRITH, TO SERVE
ALONGSIDE FIGS, TREES NEVER PREDICTING
THEY WERE SOON TO BE ORPHANED. I
WAS THERE! LEFT ON THE TABLE NEXT
TO STILL-WARM CUPS OF TEA, THE SHUFFLE
OF KEYS BEING STOWED. I WAS THERE,
SETTLERS SETTING FIRE TO LAND. I WAS THERE
TRUNKS FALLING TO SOOT. I WAS THERE,
EARTH MOURNING THE BODIED ASH.
I WAS THERE, A PEOPLE DISPOSSESSED.
I WAS ALWAYS THERE. I AM ALWAYS HERE.
THE FIRST MADE ALONG RIVER BANKS, GRAINS
OLDER THAN SETTLER THAN STATE THAN TANKS
THAN BORDERS THAN BOMBS THAN
BRITISH THAN EMPIRE & STILL
NEVER LEAVE THE HANDS THAT MAKE ME!
ID
by Hind Shoufani
Dubai/ NYC
2021
I do not want to conjure a child (I think?
As decades plummet, unaccounted
mitochondria flushed to drain), sucking
at a puckered purple, the cracked
tip, clutching the striated ooze, the doubled
cleft spillage of waist. I insist on unknowing the overfill
questions of the so-young, coming & coming
at the expense of edge shadows I demand
from the cut of steep night, the unblinking
triangles of a leg
sharp flung to delirious stars, to naked eyes, traps.
I do not want to seed an infant, either. I know this
in my linings– this fact in the apex of muscles
that cannot succumb to miracles.
I want all my placid swamps flat. Neck for the gnawing
abyss, for the transient allure of bombs
hunted through hips, in velvet & spit. Only the force
closing in, groan low snarl in the heave of water I alchemy–
this lava I ride so good. To be awake at the throb
of dawn, do with that iridescence what I will. Stagger
dim hallways in hum, bang shudder
a fucking ruckus. I shall not sleep on company schedules.
I do not wish to be shhhhh.
I do not want a plot until the end is dug, no soil
but if it must be at that one second,
then wrap me in razor willows at
sway, set forth the gale, keep roots weeping–
I do not have need for shade in the slow middle aging.
Look, the centers that gallop
are no palms for its canopy of slow, &
anyway, I do not care to pray to leaves just yet.
I do not crave fruits in the clavicle of the mountain, flies
burying ground as seasons rot in a hot flash,
& wire, the bees, & the fleas, & the ominous parade
of settler clouds I can’t count in the continental drift of just my luggage.
I have no current address. Neither aloft, nor beneath.
Please do not mail me homelands.
I do not want a bolted safe, filled gold, stuffed certificates,
littered in fake border stamps of passage
from the inked wrists of Arab men I loathe
–gates at the kitchens of my stranded loves–
those uniforms of yes sir, no sir, of course
sir– (I feel so sorry for)– no, no to slow-hulk iron
doors dragged wide to panic find
creaky identity permission slips
as the arrival of mortar says MARCH.
No also to heirlooms not slung
over the defeat retreat of my fast-arched back
that fades in distances on repeat, the way myriad
veins in your father’s fatigue dropped all
the photographs of children in the sea.
I do not want silver– maybe one fine
day I could bear its Damascene heft,
when knives dissipate, too, & then adorn my breast
but make it large
make it tainted age brushed metal shivering
in the scent of yasmine, traveled amulet of maternal
anchor. Opaque black grey matter still here;
protect captive wrists in the beds of skin I rent,
in the wanton spectacle
of my sleep. Give me instead
draped crackable beads cheap
of ivory, of stone, of wood
of fake prisms & clasps snap broken
lost in rusty drawers & shrugged at ease.
I don’t want a car, with its fixed frames,
that pin memory of parking code, looked for
noon after noon as questions rise in the hell
of undergrounds sizzling, as sediment rubble bags
laden our feet, scratching asphalt in the recoil, the run.
I do not want to drive, keeping eyelids flared
for signs, having to record the changing horizon
unable to drift into the temple of the temple
behind the forehead’s veneer. I do not steer,
ever, preferring to stare out, wrists shaking
to hold paper & some old truth. A girl is not a tree.
I do not want a cat, or a dog (I really want a big dog).
I don’t want to feed a fish or lizard. I once imagined
how much I would befriend a turtle,
who could perhaps smile under my feet for a hundred years of kin,
but now that life is cliffs, we need to hobble, quick.
I do not want a much-rifled map to any new city.
I do not want to be polite, not really.
I do not want to stand at attention, or cross my legs poked
shut by your verses. I do not want to still
my tongue, or bend hard to holy structures
in the rotten skies of those bleeding
in the name of.
I only want the exact quadrants of where it hurts
in your chest. I only want an Arab lover, perhaps
more. Perhaps less. The Mediterranean swelling
in his tongue, nimble on the rocks, adrift.
A suitcase that expands to all our laughter.
78 plants that can be thrust with warmth
at the neighbors when the next farewell clocks,
maybe trashed into mulch without a choke in the heart of the throat.
I only want to lose keys & switch beds by the month.
I only want to be kept alone
to my hands, gathering the words that are needed for the day.
I only want quiet, & a ticket, the gliding insouciance
of birds heralding my hardened boots
firm on gravel untold, thighs terra wide for
a vehicle of bones I trust, still a skeleton
in flight above the stares of strangers
who do not spell my curves right.
I only want the knowledge that you bear
children like us to ascend the branches, their saliva
the juice of cactus from a century far. Our valley
carved into their intestines, as they jump.
I want to auntie everyone.
And for the moon to stay in her place.
To challenge time’s malevolence, & get up. To fling
windows & quiver in the ragged lips– jawline un-synced
by his. To open carry a gun
no one sees. To use it. To claim only
my body, & reside inside my mouth. I want
to devour what crashes. Note down
the dialogue of spirits who held.
Etch this labour into craft erupting
out of breath as gospel. Absorb the entirety of music, digested
in mandalas that gyrate the blossom’s unfurl. Delta heat seeping
pore after pore. Tell it all. Enter jammed doorways, & pray
into pillows, wet. Occasionally, fame & glory.
To choose freedom at every fork of lung.
Sometimes, cash. Often, big bowls of soup.
For no one to have wondered where I stood on things.
So, yes, please
yes to a hand across the field
where our sorrow camps. To the revolution
of weeds. So, yes to your eyelashes, crescent
hills curved up to the dawn that lights
down the dream slope of your face.
To say nothing. To never have to say nothing.
And this, this too, is Palestinian.
Endnote
I wish to talk about love. I wish to talk about abundance.
Palestinians are persistent and our endurance is rooted in tenderness, in community.
I love us most when our language is inside my belly. I love us most when we are together—physically—and within the intimacies of these pages. I love us most with our arms linked around each other, our heartbeats in sync, our bodies in movement towards a future that is free.
It is April 2024. I imagine our fate. I try to arrive, in the words of leena aboutaleb, to “a SOFT love,” one with “no missing skin or the sovereignty of fighter jets.”
I try to celebrate us despite “the funeral air of burned / children” to quote Deema Shehabi, who reminds us we are all, collectively, “in the witness seat.”
I try to continue the work of living, which is easiest when loving, which is easiest when seeing each other in the expansiveness of what it means to be Palestinian now.
Within this anthology, George and I attempted to capture that breadth and depth—our joy, our grief, our despair, our fear, our brilliance, and our strength. We attempted to elevate a community that, though scattered in different parts of the world, is as beautiful as it is resilient.
Our contributors, living in Australia, the United States, the U.K., Canada, Palestine, and elsewhere, carry Palestine “in the joy / of the sky” (Elmusa). We insist, as Summer Farah writes, that:
I WAS ALWAYS THERE. I AM ALWAYS HERE.
THE FIRST MADE ALONG RIVER BANKS, GRAINS
OLDER THAN SETTLER THAN STATE THAN TANKS
THAN BORDERS THAN BOMBS THAN
BRITISH THAN EMPIRE & STILL
NEVER LEAVE THE HANDS THAT MAKE ME!
This is what this anthology is. It is insistence, it is community, it is survival, it is reckoning. As editors, we held these poems for many years, in weekly phone calls that kept us up past midnight. Together, we read over a thousand poems from our global community, from books we selected to read together to open calls our people so brilliantly responded to. We would recite our favorite poems aloud together to feel their words in our bodies before making final decisions. We needed to experience this fullness, allowing their music to carry our spirits beyond the page and into the work we do in our communities.
We celebrate these poems because they are poems of survival and abundant love. We celebrate our contributors and the bravery it takes to claim, reclaim, and bear the weight of writing about Palestine during excruciating circumstances and ongoing, historical, and concentrated attempts to silence us. We mourn brilliant writers like Refaat Alareer and Heba Abu Nada, who were murdered by the zionist regime, but whose words continue to inspire us.
We hope, in the words of Lina al-Sharif, “When / we are free, / this land will know peace / the poem will be complete.” Until liberation, we hope this anthology provides the rage, love, and kinship we need to continue resisting in big and small ways.
—Noor Hindi, with George Abraham