Palestinian Poetry

What I Will
by Suheir Hammad

I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin break for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.

ANTIZIONIST ABECEDARIAN
by Sam Sax

after you’ve finished
building your missiles & after your borders
collapse under the weight of their own split
databases
every worm in this
fertile & cursed
ground will be its own country.
home never was a place in dirt or even
inside the skin but rather
just exists in language. let me explain. my people
kiss books as a form of prayer. if dropped we
lift them to our lips &
mouth an honest & uncomplicated apology—
nowhere on earth belongs to us.
once a man welcomed me home as i entered the old city so i
pulled out a book of poems to show him my papers—my
queer city of paper—my people’s ink
running through my blood.
settlers believe land can be possessed—
they carve their names into firearms &
use this to impersonate the dead—we are
visitors here on earth.
who but men blame the angels for the wild
exceptionalism of men?
yesterday a bird flew through an airport & i watched that border
zone collapse under its basic wings.

If I Must Die
by Refaar Alareer

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale

What is Home?
by Mosab Abu Toha

What is home: 
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
    before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding 
    photo before the walls crumbled. 
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
   slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and 
   put in a museum. 
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and 
   roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house 
   to ashes. 
It is the café where I watched football matches
   and played—

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
   all of these? 

Naturalized
by Hala Alyan

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch.
My father never learned to swim.
I’ve already said too much.
Look, the marigolds are coming in.
Look, the cuties are watching Vice again.
Gloss and soundbites.
They like to understand.
They like to play devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
No place for a child’s braid.
Under that hospital elevator.
When this is over.
When this is over there is no over but quiet.
Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire and I will stretch my teeth into a country.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay.
They like me.
They like me in a museum.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle.
There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart is selling pomegranate seeds again.
Dumb metaphor.

I’ve ruined the dinner party.
I was given a life. Is it frivolous?
Sundays are tarot days.
Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed in thirty minutes flat.
All that spare water.
All those numbers on the side of the screen.
Here’s your math.
Here’s your hot take.
That number isn’t a number.
That number is a first word, a nickname, a birthday song in June.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that.
Here’s your testimony, here’s your beach vacation.
Imagine: I stop running when I’m tired.
Imagine: There’s still the month of June.
Tell me, what op-ed will grant the dead their dying?
What editor? What red-line?
What pocket?
What earth.
What shake.

What silence.

Nothing
by Fady Joudah

Suddenly I

“in ablaze” died.

Suddenly time

quit lingering.

Suddenly you

can’t find my body,

can’t bury

what you can’t find.

My final poem,

I wrote years before

my hour arrived.

Suddenly my voice,

thought voiceless

because stateless,

gave voice

to a noisy world.

Suddenly “a kite.”

Suddenly I.

Sunbird
By Fady Joudah

I flit
from gleaming river
to glistening sea,

from all that we
to all that me,

fresh east to salty west,
southern sweet,

and northern free
there is a lake

between us,
and aquifers
for cactus

and basins
of anemone
from the river
to the sea,

from womb
to breath and one
with oneness

I be,
from the river
to the sea.

Our Loneliness
By Hiba Abu Nada

How alone it was,
our loneliness,
when they won their wars.

Only you were left behind,
naked,
before this loneliness.
Darwish,
no poetry could ever bring it back:
what the lonely one has lost.

It’s another age of ignorance,
our loneliness.
Damned be that which divided us
then stands united
at your funeral.

Now your land is auctioned
and the world’s
a free market.

It’s a barbaric era,
our loneliness,
one when none will stand up for us.

So, my country, wipe away your poems,
the old and the new,
and your tears,
and pull yourself together.

“We Teach Life, Sir”
By Rafeef Ziadah

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response.
And I perfected my English and I learned my UN Resolutions.
But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?
Pause.
I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza.
Patience has just escaped me.
Pause. Smile.
We teach life, Sir.
Rafeef, remember to smile.
Pause.
We teach life, Sir.
We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky.
We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies.
We teach life, Sir.
But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound bites and word limits.
And just give us a story, a human story.
You see, this is not political.
We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story.
Don’t mention that word “apartheid” and “occupation”.
This is not political.
You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?
How about you?
Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun?
Hand me over your dead and give the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood.
But they felt sorry.
They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza.
So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject.
And these are two equal sides: occupier and occupied.
And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead.
And between that, war crimes and massacre, I vent out words and smile “not exotic”, “not terrorist”.
And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead.
Is anyone out there?
Will anyone listen?
I wish I could wail over their bodies.
I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
And let me just tell you, there is nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this.
And no sound-bite, no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life.
No sound-bite will fix this.
We teach life, Sir.
We teach life, Sir.
We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, Sir.

Barely Breathing
By Najwan Darwish

Sorrow pours from the rooms
while I, like a ghost, enter your abandoned homes,
holding my end in my hand,
sleeping and waking with my ruin.
It’s dispiriting to become acquainted
with my own desolation,
to keep step with it to this extent.
They weigh on me – these abandoned houses,
this desertion that fills your homes.
I enter their hollowed hearts, and can barely breathe . . .

Neither Arabs nor Persians nor Byzantines can feel me now.
Didn’t I ever have a history?
And how did I lose them along the way –
poems that were the world unfurling, in a moment?
And how were you lost, all of you?
You took my share of loss
and left abandonment behind,
a planet with no ribs –
you left it for me, you left it
to burden me.

If I said I was leaving
there would still be no one here
but abandonment,
with its hoarse voice that’s swallowing my own.

All Your Armies
By Ghassan Kanafani

All your armies
All your fighters
All your tanks
And all your soldiers

Against the boy

Holding a stone
Standing there
All alone

In his eyes
I see the sun
In his smile
I see the moon
And I wonder
I only wonder

Who is weak and
Who is strong

Who is right and
Who is wrong

And I wish
I only wish
The the truth
Has a tongue!

This Bread Was Born,
This Bread Was Killed
By Basman Aldirawi

With clean hands,
he gently sifts the flour,
and adds a handful of yeast.
He pours the warm water
for the yeast particles to live,
then rolls and kneads and rolls
and kneads the dough.

He lets the soft mass rest.

With firm but gentle hands,
he rounds it into balls,
flattens them into shape,
and handles each one
delicately into the oven.

Soon, perhaps in half an hour,
the bread rolls are born fresh,
healthy and browned.

The newborn breads breathe,
yet dust chokes the air,
searing gasses penetrate
their thin, fragile crusts.

On the day of their birth, a missile,
a bakery, a scattering
of zaatar, flesh, and blood.

We Deserve A Better Death
By Mosab Abu Toha

We deserve a better death.
Our bodies are disfigured and twisted,
embroidered with bullets and shrapnel.
Our names are pronounced incorrectly
on the radio and TV.
Our photos, plastered onto the walls of our buildings,
fade and grow pale.
The inscriptions on our gravestones disappear,
covered in the feces of birds and reptiles.
No one waters the trees that give shade
to our graves.
The blazing sun has overwhelmed
our rotting bodies.

Enough For Me
By Fadwa Tuqan

Enough for me to die on her earth
be buried in her
to melt and vanish into her soil
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country.

Enough for me to remain
in my country’s embrace
to be in her close as a handful of dust
a sprig of grass
a flower.