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.