God, why are You, the Creator of the known universe, letting Palestine die
Virgil, please look at me
my sad face that was once full of
love for you is now empty, made up
of lonely nights, Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, the ball found in a refugee
camp. I wake, get out of bed. Barefoot,
I walk to the kitchen. I boil manifestos
in the kettle. I eat leftover egg mayonnaise
on bread. I map out pain but I don’t have
to do that now, not yet. The silence is waiting
for me. My bathwater is getting cold. The
horse impatient, but, instead, I then map out
pain with these hands. My pain. This
pain that tastes bittersweet. It tastes like
dark chocolate and rain and sweet like a
banana. I drink in this pain like I drink in
Palestine. I get lost in the clouds above
the refugee camp. The clouds made of
a fallen empire, cities of night. The clouds
made of children’s faces. I see the man’s
face again. I am holding it in my hands. The
leaf falls and it’s buried in the ocean. The
ocean that I am swimming in is filled with
orphans. Look at me! I am swimming in
ketchup and grease, fish fingers, hot chips,
blue wrists, lifeless wildflowers. I’m writing
a letter to God. Look at the sadness in my eyes.
Let the sun and grass grow in every soldier’s
heart. Let every soldier on both sides hear a
child’s laughter in the barrel of the gun. Let
them remember their mothers’ eyes and
childhood for Palestine’s sake.
And let them remember the words of this poem.
So Now What
(for Charles Bukowski)
During war,
milk is the colour of blood, honey
the colour of bone
The skulls here are bored
They want a new life, not this tragedy
I’m listing all your war crimes
I remember being happy
But I don’t want to remember
I don’t want to remember the man
I remember bombs and Gaza instead
Amputated limbs like branches
Here, everything tastes like seawater
I hope I’ll wake up from this dream soon
And that the man will return to me
in the morning and to numb the pain
I take the pills one by one
and a fog descends upon me
I wish you had decided to stay
so that we could make things work
but you never did and the truth is
I must accept that as fact and choose to live
For some time I breathed easier
in this world because of you
Because you had become all my reasons
I have questions and they trouble me
Do I still live inside your heart and
inside your life as a passing thought?
I write a letter to God and put it inside a poem.
At night I pray for Israel too, because in war nobody wins.
I pray for soldiers on both sides.
That their blood will turn into flowers.
Antigone, there are no more trees in Palestine, or, salt found in earth (in Palestine)
I found a child’s body lying in
the dust of what was once a mosque
I told the child I would write a letter
That I would write a letter to my
Christian God who abhors brutality of this
kind. Maybe my God could do
something about this kind of pain
and suffering. I’ll put it in a poem,
I said to the child’s soul
I buried the child’s body in that street
where the mosque used to exist,
have its own universe. There are
no more trees in Gaza. There are
only refugees in Palestine and dead
children lying in unmarked graves
but there are unmarked graves everywhere.
Africa, for one, Europe, for another (because
of wars), and Israel, reason being
because of genocide.
Dear God,
Thank you for suffering
I’ve been through so much myself this year
Thank you for pain
my heart is a survivor
Thank you for the wildflowers
they provide happiness, a sense of self
Thank you for this rain
it offers me tranquility and comfort
Thank you for the fog
that hides my tears
Thank you for the children of Palestine
They give me hope
Thank for the man
who was briefly in my life
He loved me and made me
feel beautiful for a short while
Thank you for this year, however,
it was sad, long and exhausting
and I am glad it’s nearly over.
Refaat Alareer
There is hope born in death and death born in hope
These are not empty words, you said
I looked at the exhaustion on your face
I thought of the flowers in Gaza, the orange
and lemon trees, the last olive you ate,
the last shower you took, the last prayer
you said, the last time you boiled a
manifesto in the kettle, stirred coffee
and sugar into a mug, the last time you watched
an American film, the last newspaper you
read, the last dead body you saw, the
last book you opened, the last time you
saw your family, your wife and children.
I have stopped watching the updates of
the Palestinian genocide. They use to
call it the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but now
it is a genocide. It’s become to much
for me to take. My tears can fill an ocean
and carry the orphans in an ark until
this war is over but there’s no end to a war
like this. Perhaps when we reach the end
of the world the war will end. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Where are all the wildflowers, what happened to the books
You walk like the trees, you will
always walk like the trees from the
river to the sea, Palestine. I offer
you gifts. Oranges, tea, flowers, life.
You do not beg, you do not steal,
you do not say anything at all when
they say they have to amputate
I listen to two poems by Ali Sobh
I make spaghetti and watch the fine
sticks that I can so easily snap into
two with my fingers turn into noodles
Noodles not dead bodies. Not heads
I have something to eat and I’m grateful
for that but Palestine is hungry. How
she longs for the sweetness of milk, the
kindness of honey, the protein that
chicken provides. By now, the river
has turned to blood and the children into
angels and the mosques and hospitals
into dust. I cry me a river. My eyes are red.
My tears, the memory of blood.
I know what it feels like to be broken,
heart shattered, body in pieces
So do you, Palestine. So do you.
Flowers for Palestine, forgiveness in this time of war
It’s late. I should be asleep but I’m not.
Instead, I’m watching a 60 minute interview
with Colson Whitehead, he won the Pulitzer
back-to-back, John Updike being the only
other writer to win consecutively. I sleep-
walk walk-slouch to the kitchen and make a hot
cup of tea. I listen to a reading of
Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar. It is read in Russian
and I cannot understand a word. Then it is
read in English and I understand every word
but not everything. I know I will forget these
poems by the time I wake up in the morning.
I will forget writing this poem in response
to Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar poem. No tears
fall but something creeps into my heart and
my heart drops. There is something I cannot
escape in this life. Having bipolar. Bipolar
comes with rejection from family, isolation,
the label of the outsider and the writing of
these poems. Very soon, I will take a pill to
fall asleep. I will wake up with a brain fog. In
war, as in psychosis, there is a price to pay
for both sides. The poet lives with truth, and his
poetry contains life just as much life as that
which seeps out of a dead body in the snow.
The rain falls and washes the blood away
purely to keep the streets pure and clean.
In the hospital, the sick body recovers.
Lux
The skin, thunder, her skin is perfect. It is milk, it is
pale, it is privileged. I talk about this in
romantic undertones. I write a novella about
it. I mask my envy, live in my house, and live.
My skin is the colour of a green sea. It is
orange peel and stretchmarks. It is a tapestry. Stars are to
be found there, the universe, a tribe of singing
angels. No woman is proud of cellulite, of the scarring on her
heart that she has carried into middle-age.
She bathes in light and this privilege I want
so badly. This author bathes with bath salts and Pears
soap, lavender Vinolia bath oil. Fenjal is on the
bathroom windowsill. The blood washes over me.
I taste blood in my mouth. The bullet. I can’t
get the stain out. I turn the bullet into a rose.
It’s futile. You can’t turn bullets into roses.
My mute paternal grandfather taught me that.
I expose Palestine’s smoke to the light. The
light turns the air strikes on Gaza into a pilot.
The bombs are sent to a storage holder on the moon.
The war is abandoned and peace reigns but
then I woke up and I realised I was dreaming
and that today was Palestine’s funeral.
