Sometimes she feels very lonely on the earth.
She wants to walk openly with children.
Live the way they might.
Have a party with white cookies on simple plates.
Lots of them.
Nuts chopped fine.
She wants everyone to share.
Small People
Janna says the camera is stronger than the gun.
“I can send my message to small people
and they send it to others.”
Sun improving consciousness.
Wind ruffling discomfort.
Janna, we are small indeed.
Weighing the word “dream”
as it slips through midnight air.
Small people keeping it alive.
Help us ride on every train
to better history. Weighing
“fog” and “suitcase,” weighing “tomorrow”—
before we know two words in this life,
we’re already missing
what already left.
Women in Black
I would be one when I grew up.
Hovering, so watchful outside
government buildings, black T-shirts,
black jackets and scarves and gowns—
till then I am a girl in stripes.
They hold a belief—we could all
get along—Arabs, Jews, Swedes,
people with candles, or without.
Even if taunted or hit by stones,
rubber bullets,
we would keep watching,
No Violence!
No War! Trying to be more like
the peaceful village oasis,
Wahat al-Salaam, Nevi Shalom—
half-and-half everything,
school administrators, village counselors,
grocers, gardeners, kids, founded by
a Christian Brother,
why couldn’t all villages be like that?
What is wrong with us?
I flip the pages of the tattered Benetton catalogue
my friend’s mother still keeps in a drawer—
from before we were born,
Arabs and Jews as true friends
on every page, real people
telling their stories, you could not tell which
is which—aren’t there more?
Surely there are more. Red plastic chairs
sitting outside stone and stucco houses,
waiting for us. Waiting for us to sit together.
A project called UNHATE vs. guns.
Which would you choose?
But look how many guns!
Who did this to us?
Money? Guilt?
People in other countries did this to us?
Some people carrying guns look 12 years old.
My father always told me beware of righteousness.
If you are too right, everyone else is wrong.
Illegal settlements creep up the hills at night
erasing our old villages. Boxy white houses
with red roofs marching toward
our old stone terraces. Would you like that?
Americans, would you?
Women in Black don’t carry brooms
but I want them to sweep away our pain.
Here by the hills where angels once appeared,
my mother heard of a journalist who answered
How to solve this dilemma?
by saying, Put everything in the hands of women!
Women in black, women in white.
The men had their chance and failed.
Sure, a few women like Golda
said Palestinians didn’t exist—
she must have had bad eyesight.
So many voices without a chance yet.
Mine, for example.
It is our turn now.
And That Mysterious Word Holy
You might as well take a rotten lemon,
squeeze it in your hand.
Let the juice trickle down your wrist and arm,
sharp bite of acidity prickling your
scratches and scars and say,
I bow down to you.
When the almond tree erupts into
blossom without help from any people—
I bow down. Here we are in the land
of sacred story, chant, shrines,
altars and grottoes, parables,
and soldiers in camouflage are carrying guns.
What does that say about holy?
How much power it doesn’t have—
Thou shalt not kill crumpled under our feet.
And why do they wear camouflage?
We can still see them.
Who are they hiding from?
The guns are bigger than we are.
The tanks are bigger than shrines.
Tear gas canisters, grenade casings
littering graves of our ancestors in the cemetery.
I bow down. You bow to the big shining platter
everyone eats off together. Sit in a circle
for your holy rice. Speak after me.
Holy eggplant, my best angel.
Netanyahu
You don’t need a periscope
or a microscope
to see another human being
guiding a child
hand on shoulder of child
arranging coverlet over sleeping child—
You don’t need a stethoscope
to imagine a heartbeat.
What does it mean when one person thinks
others deserve nothing?
What is that called?
If you know what it is called, why keep
doing it?
You don’t need a skewer for broiling
or a paring knife for seeing inside.
Studying English
COURAGE
has age
in it
but I say
age is not required.
A man from Scotland came to visit,
brought us square, buttery cookies,
repeated Steady at the tiller,
when he wandered our streets.
I had to search for the
meaning. Keeping control
of a situation, staying firm,
phrase often used in seafaring context,
though we have no boats, no rudders,
but originally the phrase connected to
a felled tree, of which we have plenty.
Losing as Its Own Flower
What if we had just said, OK we lose.
How would they have treated us then?
I ask my people, they gasp,
and all have different answers.
No, no, we can never give up.
Stay strong, keep speaking truth.
Truth unfolds in the gardens,
massive cabbages, succulent tomatoes,
orange petals billowing,
even when the drought is long.
Hang on tightly to what we have,
though just a scrap.
The ancestors would be ashamed
if we gave up. The invaders said our land
was barren and sad.
They said we were anti-Semitic.
But we were Semites too.
What could we do?
Giving up is different from losing.
In a way, we did lose. Where is everybody?
Scattered around the world like pollen.
Disappeared into the sunset.
Mingling with other cultures
in the great bubbling stew of the world.
See, we are good at that, why couldn’t we
have done better with our invaders?
They came pretending we were
an alien species. Said they had deep ties here,
some of them did, but what about ours?
Why couldn’t we all have ties?
They said God said.
(Always trouble.)
We replied, See the stone stoop of my house
with my rubbed footprints in it
after all these years?
See my shining key?
They said we made everything up.
We were crazy.
Is losing worse than being called crazy?
So we did lose. We lost our rhythm of regular living.
You want the page to be clean.
The day wide open, nobody suffering.
We lost our bearings, their voices
blew hard on us, trying to erase,
turning us inside out in their minds,
changing what we became.
Tried to make the world see us that way too.
We were the undeserving.
See what people do?
We could live up to their lies if
they made us crazy enough.
So we did lose.
Professors, educated students, best maker of maklouba,
math students of Gaza, embroiderers of the West Bank,
lemon vendors, grapefruit-growers,
artist who stayed in her room painting egg cartons
for so many days, where are you?
(She went to Italy.)
I too dream of Italy, France, Greece.
A village climbing a hill
where I’m not always looking back
over my shoulder,
eyes aren’t tipping to the sides
to catch approaching tanks and jeeps,
but this is my job.
Before speech, a baby makes a cat-cry.
Maybe I knew even then.
To document. To pay attention.
We wore striped T-shirts, they wore camouflage.
To be with my family on our ground.
If you live like a real human being—
that is the issue. Not winning and hunting others.
Not dominating.
Not sending your sewage their direction.
Did you know? Did you know they do this?
Not just refusing to lose.
Pink
The grandfather said he wouldn’t die
and then he died
which is why
I am staring so hard into the sunset
Mothers Waiting for Their Sons
One boy on the horizon.
A boy is a mountain.
Mother waiting for the moment
when his face comes into sight.
He’s dubious about so much hugging now
but the hands, clutched together,
mother and son, still a perfect fit.
Like a mountain when you sit on it.
“ISRAELIS LET BULLDOZERS GRIND TO HALT”
American newspaper headline on the Internet
As if the bulldozers had their own lives
and were just being bulldozers
crushing houses
schoolrooms
clinics
art galleries
whole worlds
on their own time
no people involved.
“Deadline for Demolition”
as if cruelty had its own calendar
a banker or a businessman.
I am mad about language
covering pain
big bandage
masking the wound
let let let
but underneath
the hot blood clotting.
Harvest
The American doctors come to see
what we are living through when we pick olives.
They stand as witnesses, in circles in the grove.
They help hold the ladders.
The doctors say they are shocked to see.
We don’t know what it would feel like,
not having guns pointed at us. Guns
have been pointed at us all our lives.
America, don’t act surprised, you bought them!
Just tell us how to be a farmer, with guns.
Or celebrate a birthday, with guns.
No guns invited!
The doctors say they will go home and tell
what they experienced. Their kindness is
a balm. Don’t people know already?
Where is that news?
Some say Israel would be happiest
if we just disappeared. Like in a magic show?
Our magic is that we are
still here and were always here.
Shadow
Some people feel lost inside their days.
Always waiting for worse to happen.
They make bets with destiny.
My funniest uncle gave up cursing bad words
inside his head. He says he succeeded
one whole hour. He tried to unsubscribe to
the universe made by people. He slept outside
by himself on top of the hill.
When Facebook says I have “followers”—
I hope they know I need their help.
Subscribe to plants, animals, stars,
music, the baby who can’t walk yet but
stands up holding on to the sides of things,
tables, chairs, and takes a few clumsy steps,
then sits down hard. This is how we live.
Dead Sea
You could call it a friend, holding you
in its salty palm, letting you feel lighter
on the planet thanks to salt, playing its
joke. I love its somber gray sheen,
its loneliness. It might have preferred
to be a cool wave, an icy Arctic lake,
or the burbling spring my grandmother listened to
her whole childhood before the settlers
drained it off from us. She says the spring
had secrets and knew where jewels were,
in a house nobody lived in, and only children
would ever find the key.
Tattoo
When I hear about “forgotten people” I think,
they are not forgotten by me.
I knew the man down the alley by the market
who dragged his leg. He was out there, smoking,
almost my whole life.
His blue tattered pants,
the small denim pouch like a pocket
around his neck.
It didn’t make sense,
but he was always smiling,
if you nodded at him, or not,
chattering words to
a patience prayer, over and over.
It sounded more like Aramaic than Arabic.
He seemed happier to drag somewhere,
the short stone wall under the trees,
than people who find it easy to get there.
On his arm, the tattoo of a skinny blue moon.
He said it was the moon people like least
so he was going to like it most. Fingernail
flicker, little boat, holy symbol
without the star. Are you going to get a tattoo?
he used to tease the kids. We all said, No!
But he is tattooed on my mind
since he disappeared.
He rises in the darkest sky.
Sometimes There Is a Day
Sometimes there is a day you just want
to get so far away from.
Feel it shrink inside you like an island,
as if you were on a boat.
I always wish to be on a boat.
Then, maybe, no more fighting
about land. I want that day to feel
as if it never happened, when Ahmad was burned,
when people were killed, when my cousin was shot.
The day someone went to jail
is not a day that shines.
I want to have a clear mind again,
as a baby who stares at the light
wisping through the window and thinks,
That’s mine.
Advice
My friend,
dying, said do the hard thing first.
Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day.
The second thing will seem less hard.
She didn’t tell me what to do when everything seems hard.
America Gives Israel Ten Million Dollars a Day
In jail:
Lama Khater has a two-year-old. She is not allowed to
write about politics and has been detained
7 times. The Israeli jail won’t let her sleep.
Salah Hamouri is French/Palestinian, a lawyer,
detained without charges or trial for more than a year.
His house was invaded three days after he passed the bar.
Party for justice!
Mustapha Awad, Belgian artist and dancer, was crossing
the border from Jordan to visit his family’s properties
when he was seized. Travel at your leisure! He does not
have a Palestinian ID.
We should all be concerned about Mohammed Zayed,
returned to prison after already serving a 19-year sentence.
No details on his new arrest, but said to be unrelated
to his first jailing. Wearing a black and white striped
French-style T-shirt in his photo, he is a Palestinian citizen
of Israel since 1948. He must be exhausted.
Who you are, exactly, or what you have been doing
all these years appears to be of little interest to Israeli
authorities when they jail you. It could be nothing.
It could be a word in a poem. Or the hand of a girl
slapping a soldier who just shot her cousin.
Wouldn’t you slap him too?
Israel receives 38 billion dollars from the United
States to comfort them. Why would they care who you are?
People are jailed for pitching a stone.
Malak Mattar, a young painter of extraordinary promise,
cannot travel to France or the UK to see her exhibited work.
She knows people in those places would have welcomed her.
But some people do not want Palestinians
to “lead normal lives.”
What do people in power really think about young artists?
Do they know they exist? Are artists ever normal?
And Yousef, how dare you wish to go to school?
Why should you involve yourself with student activities?
How dare you major in Electrical Engineering?
Yousef is now banned from entering
his campus. His family is “tense and frustrated.”