A funeral wreath for Gaza, apartheid for us
I am transparent
I am thing
I am war
I am insomniac
I am dream
I am war
I am atomised
I am radioactive
I am war
I am child
I am mother
I am father
I am poet
I am war
I am Africa
I am war
I am writing to reach you
I am war
I am not calm
In war, no one is calm
My poems
mean absolutely nothing
to the ghosts that
now inhabit Gaza.
What honey and milk taste like during war
You, war, talk to me of
the alternate universe
you live in, talk to me or
don’t talk to me of
your dead. In war, the
child is alone. The poet
stands alone. I think of all
the summers I was
loved. I am waiting for the
dead to meet me
For my second mother
to greet me, for her to
embrace me, call me,
welcome me home.
You, Gaza, are Steve
Biko. You will always
be remembered. Monuments
will be built in your honour.
I will remember your name for
centuries. I picked up
the human bone in the dirt.
It, too, was a gift.
Prayer For The Future or Wildflowers Growing Out Of The Eyes Of The Sun
He’s going to have
children with
another woman
because I can’t
have them anymore
Wildflowers bloom
in my stomach
lining, my aorta,
my cranial devices,
my medulla oblongata,
my womb
There’s a starry-starry night
in my ovaries
Oh, they have never seen nor
felt the light of day
No children have I
No man by my side
Only an army
Angels in front
Angels behind
And the infinite potential of
The mind
I teach millions of children
about the nature of the medicinal
properties of plants
How to heal and knit and sew
propaganda to the instruments of change
Dear Gaza,
the world will never
forget your dead
Dead children
Dead women
Dead men
I will always love that river
The ebb and flow of that river
To the sea
Watch me chase
the cloud like a horse
Call upon the birds
to feast on shrapnel
To protect the children’s eyes
To protect their liberty.
4th of March, 2024
I did it for Yasser
No extremist was I
There was a cause I was fighting for
An issue at stake
One fine autumn day
my mother was Russia
and I was Biden
I called her entourage
and said I wanted a meeting
but they giggled behind my
back and so my mother and
I went our separate ways
I ate Jerusalem in tiny bite sized
pieces but my mother told me in
no uncertain terms that I had to share
So I divided what I had left into
two between the east and the west,
calmly composed myself and went
in search of Oriental studies.
2nd of March, 2024