“Do You Condemn Hamas?”
Do you know the weight of
77 years’ worth
of bones, villages, and homes?
The sound of olive trees
screaming through flames?
Do you confuse prison break
With apocalypse,
Genocide with self-defense,
Or do you know what it means
to yearn for the sea?
What does it mean
What does it mean to live
language’s impossibility?
To be bombed into a cage
whose outside they call
“Reason.”
a poem joins the resistance*
a poem has nothing to lose
a poem is the best shot
a poem smokes too many cigarettes
a poem looks directly at the sun
a poem breathes return
a poems births poet armies
a poem sweats defiance
a poem hijacks consciousness
a poem takes no prisoners
a poem frees the people
a poem won’t take it easy
a poem frees the land
a poem won’t just a minute
a poem eats apartheid walls
a poem is done with dialogue
to the students of the encampment
A border, like race, is a cruel fiction
Maintained by constant policing, violence
Always threatening a new map.
–Wendy Trevino, Brazilian Is Not a Race, #16
The holiest word I know
is no.
–Sam Sax
contrary to what they say,
enough
is not always
enough. even before
the billy clubs, it can take
so little
to crack the soul and
self until
there is nothing left
but debris named
“the way it is”
and
“how it’s always been”
or
“the real world.”
THANK YOU
for reminding us
there’s
no such thing
as a real world,
for teaching us
with nothing but
a tent, how there are
no borders
of ethics
or place or
peoplehood,
just the fictions we choose
to live by
to be murdered by
and to
refuse.
June Jordan was right
June Jordan was
right: it’s been 43 yrs and still we
must speak by not speaking about
the things we
do not wish to speak about.
it’s been 43 yrs and
the dirt is still red and
“not quite covering all of the arms and legs”
43 yrs and still we
affirm by
negating the negated
redacting the redacted
still we charge G-E-N-O-C-I-D-E
through folklore. still more professionals
doing it just makes it
professional folklore.
it’s been 43 years and
there is still “the stench that will not float,”
still “rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory”
more “unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
‘to purify’ a people”
43 years later we must also speak
by not speaking about
in no particular order
in no exhaustive rendering
flesh melting
from bones, the inside
of children’s skulls
surgery
with no anesthesia
mass graves mass
starvation mass torture
mass rape mass mass mass
the would-be mother
of naught.
i must confess it’s
been harder
to let go.
i find myself forgetting
mid-dream, mid-sentence
i we need
to write
from otherwise.
especially with
the “laughter of evil”
still “relentless”
now cyborg
drone-fitted
in our
pockets and inboxes and
budget committees.
still “the people who refuse to be purified…
are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning”
More “become” Palestinian
as we commit to let
oppression
wound outward.
June Jordan
was right:
43 yrs later we’re
far from home, from
living room, and
through that distance
we’re making
our way
here.
“a poem joins the resistance*” was first published in the anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, published by Haymarket Books in 2025 and co-edited by George Abraham and Noor K. Hindi.
