For Janna
The tiny journalist
will tell us what she sees.
Document the moves, the dust,
soldiers blocking the road.
Yes, she knows how to take a picture
with her phone. Holds it high
like a balloon. Yes, she would
prefer to dance and play,
would prefer the world
to be pink. It is her job to say
what she sees, what is happening.
From her vantage point everything
is huge—but don’t look down on her.
She’s bigger than you are.
If you stomp her garden
each leaf expands its view.
Don’t hide what you do.
She sees you at 2 a.m. adjusting your
impenetrable vest.
What could she have
that you want? Her treasures,
the shiny buttons her grandmother loved.
There might have been a shirt …
The tiny journalist notices
action on far away roads
farther even than the next village.
She takes counsel from bugs so
puffs of dust find her first.
Could that be a friend?
They pretended not to see us.
They came at night with weapons.
What was our crime? That we liked
respect as they do? That we have pride?
She stares through a hole in the fence,
barricade of words and wire,
feels the rising fire
before anyone strikes a match.
She has a better idea.
I am lonely
for my friends.
They liked me,
trusted my coming.
I think they looked up at me
more than other people do.
I who have been staring down so long
see no reason for the sorrows humans make.
I dislike the scuffle of bombs blasting
very much. It blocks my view.
A landscape of grieving
feels different afterwards.
Different sheen from a simple desert,
rubble of walls, silent children who once said
my name like a prayer.
Sometimes I am bigger than
a golden plate,
a giant coin,
and everyone gasps.
Maybe it is wrong
that I am so calm.
Exotic Animals, Book for Children
Armadillo means
“little armored one.”
Some of us become this to survive
in our own countries.
I would like to see an armadillo
crossing the road.
Our armor is invisible,
it polishes itself.
We might have preferred to be
a softer animal, wouldn’t you?
With fur and delicate paws,
like an African Striped Grass Mouse,
also known as Zebra Mouse.
At 7, making videos.
At 10, raising the truth flag.
At 11, raising it higher,
traveling to South Africa,
keffiyah knotted on shoulders,
interviews in airports.
Please, could you tell us …
You know gazing into a camera
can be a bridge, so you stare
without blinking.
People drift to the sides of the film,
don’t want to be noticed,
put on the spot.
You know the spot is the only thing
that matters.
What else? Long days,
tired trousers pinned
on roof lines,
nothing good expected.
It’s right in front of me,
I didn’t go looking for it.
We’re living in the middle of trouble.
No reason not to say it straight.
They do not consider us equal.
They blame us for everything,
forgetting what they took,
how they took it.
We are made of bone and flesh and story
but they poke their big guns
into our faces
and our front doors
and our living rooms
Why can’t they see
how beautiful we are?
The saddest part?
We all could have had
twice as many friends.
When the milk is sour,
it separates.
The next time you stop speaking,
ask yourself why you were born.
They say they are scared of us.
The nuclear bomb is scared of the cucumber.
When my mother asks me to slice cucumbers,
I feel like a normal person with fantastic dilemmas:
Do I make rounds or sticks? Shall I trim the seeds?
I ask my grandmother if there was ever a time
she felt like a normal person every day,
not in danger, and she thinks for as long
as it takes a sun to set and says, Yes.
I always feel like a normal person.
They just don’t see me as one.
We would like the babies not to find out about
the failures waiting for them. I would like
them to believe on the other side of the wall
is a circus that just hasn’t opened yet. Our friends,
learning how to juggle, to walk on tall poles.
And went to jail.
We were asking, What?
You beat us with butts of guns
for years,
tear-gas our grandmas,
and you can’t take
Resist?
In Northern Ireland They Called It “The Troubles”
What do we call it?
The very endless nightmare?
The toothache of tragedy?
I call it the life no one would choose.
To be always on guard,
never secure,
jumping when a skillet drops.
I watch the babies finger their
cups and spoons and think
they don’t know yet.
They don’t know how empty
the cup of hope can feel.
Here in the land of tea and coffee
offered on round trays a million times
a day, still a thirst so great
you could die every night, longing
for a better life.
The tiny journalist
is growing taller very quickly.
She’s adding breadth, depth,
to every conversation,
asking different questions, not just
Who What When Where Why?
but How long? How can it be?
What makes this seem right to you?
Even when she isn’t present,
she might be taping from the trees.
What happened to you in the twentieth century?
Remember? We never forgot about it. You did.
Rounded up at gunpoint, our people
brutally beaten, pummeled in prisons,
massacred for a rumor of stones.
Once there was a stuffed squash
who didn’t wish to be eaten.
Kousa habibti, pine nuts for eyes.
I dreamed about her when I was five.
She helped me start my mission.
In memory, Fr. Gerry Reynolds of Belfast, “Let us pray for Palestine”
How lonely the word PEACE is becoming.
Missing her small house under the olive trees.
The grandmothers carried her in a bucket when
they did their watering.
She waited for them in the sunrise,
then fell back into reach. Whole lives unfolded.
The uncles tucked her into suit coat pockets
after buttoning white shirts for another day.
Fathers, mothers, babies
heard her whispering in clouds over Palestine,
mingling softly, making a promise,
sending her message to the ground.
It wasn’t a secret.
Things will calm down soon, she said.
Hold your head up. Don’t forget.
When Ahed went to prison, we shook
our tired hands in the air and wept.
Young girl dreaming of a better world!
Don’t shoot her cousins, my cousins, our cousins.
Wouldn’t you slap for that?
It was only a slap.
The word Peace a ticket elsewhere for some.
People dreamed night and day of calmer lives.
Maybe Peace would be their ticket back too.
They never threw away that hope. Karmic wheel,
great myth of fairness kept spinning …
I dreamed of Ahed’s hair.
When I was born, they say
a peaceful breeze lilted the branches—
my first lullaby. The temperature dropped.
A voice pressed me forward,
told me to speak.
Being raised in a house of stories with garlic
gave me courage.
Everything began, Far, far away. Long, long ago.
And everything held us close.
Is this your story, or mine?
Olive oil lives in a dented can with a long spout.
What happens to Peace when people fight?
(She hides her face.)
What does she dream of?
(Better people.)
Does she ever give up?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whose religion would you follow?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
They had already paid his fees.
I asked a rabbi demonstrating against us
if his people could imagine our sorrows.
Could they just hold their own thoughts for a moment
and imagine what we feel like?
He was quiet, staring at me.
I made a rabbi quiet.
Could he imagine the pain of the boy Ahmad Dawabsha,
only survivor of his family terribly burned
when the settlers threw a Molotov cocktail into
his house? No more mother, father, baby brother,
Ahmad, once the most beautiful little boy you can imagine,
Ahmad, now alone with sorrow and scars and pain,
wrapping his wounds. And this is what
the rabbi said: I don’t know. I don’t know
if we can imagine it.
And that is the problem.
Thank you for insulting me.
You helped me see how much I was worth.
Thank you for overlooking my humanity.
In that moment I gained power.
To be forgotten by the wider world
and the righteous religious
and the weaponized soldiers
is not the worst thing.
It gives you time to discover yourself.
*
Lemons.
Mint.
Almonds roasted and salted.
Almonds raw.
Pistachios roasted and salted.
Cheese.
Arabic fairy tales begin this way,
so do Arabic days.
A pantry is empty
but Mama still produces a tray of tea and cookies
for the guest.
West is still the way we stare—
knowing there’s blue space and free water
over there. There’s a Palestinian and a Jew
building a synagogue together in Arkansas.
They’re friends, with respect.
Actually our water
isn’t free either
nor are the fish my friends in Gaza
aren’t allowed to catch.
It was or it wasn’t a democracy,
a haven
for human beings,
but only some of them.
You can’t do that with people,
pretend they aren’t there.
It was or it wasn’t a crowd.
Diploma, marriage, legacy,
babies being born,
children being killed,
it was or it wasn’t going to work out.
(Dr. Luke Peterson)
1.
It’s in your cuffs.
The cup you just drank from.
Empty bucket outside back door with an inch of rain in it.
Sack of mulch to scatter on your winter beds.
Do you see these things as luxury?
It’s the crosswalk kids march in.
Mama with her yellow belt
waving them through. It’s rules.
It’s everything you keep a long time
in your refrigerator—pickles, tonic, apple butter.
Butter. The fact you have a refrigerator
and power to run it all day long.
Gaza might like that.
2.
The world’s largest open-air prison keeps ticking day to day—
alarm clocks, kindergartens, spinach mixed into eggs,
little blue backpacks for kids,
a few filtered-water fountains, plastic bottles carried home,
and no, they can’t go swimming, can’t fish in their own sea,
can’t fly from their airport, can’t visit the so-called Holy City,
can’t do anything, basically, except be human, be humane.
They can go to the Book Club and read books.
And people far away won’t turn their heads to see
what Gaza is doing or how well they are doing it.
Or how hard it is.
Even when 500 people die from bombs they supplied.
They won’t cry because the dead ones weren’t someone
they knew and loved. Like the person sitting next to them
on the couch.
When people have a lot
they want more
When people have nothing
they will happily share it
*
Some people say
never getting your way
builds character
By now our character must be
deep and wide as a continent
Africa, Australia
giant cascade of stars
spilling over our huge night
*
Where did the power go?
Did it enjoy its break?
Is power exhausted?
What is real power?
Who really has power?
Did the generator break?
Do we imagine silence
more powerful because
it might contain everything?
Quiet always lives
inside noise.
But does it get much done?
*
for truth to break it
*
Calendars can weep too
They want us to have better days
*
Welcome to every minute
Feel lucky you’re still in it
*
No bird builds a wall
*
Sky purse
jingling
change
*
Won’t give up
our hopes
for anything!
*
Not your fault
You didn’t make the world
*
cried the person who believed in praying
God willing God willing God willing
There were others who prayed
to ruins & stumps
*
Open palms
hold more
*
Refuse to give
mistakes
too much power
*
Annoying person?
Person who told me to stay home
and do what other girls do?
If you disappeared
I still might miss you
*
Babies want to help us
They laugh
for no reason
*
Pay close attention to
a drop of water
on the kitchen table
You cannot say one word about religion
and exclude Ahmad
Each Day We Are Given So Many Gifts
I did it
I made friends with a fly
Yawn a little pause
relighting breath
Blink a break
from sun’s sharp gaze
Yesterday evening after rain
the world tiled rosy
such a brief slip of minutes
as if someone got her wish
we could live in pink hold a shining note
release someone else’s anger
Not your city—
everyone’s city.
Not my city—
everyone’s city.
City of time—
holding time.
Deeper than time.
Time’s true city.
Our cousin Sami said at night when he can’t sleep
he thinks about everything he missed that day.
Which way didn’t he turn his head?
Whose face didn’t he notice?
He gets the answer to the problem he missed
on the test. He finally remembers where they buried
the one cat who sat in anyone’s lap.
Sends me a message with a quote
from Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet:
“And now let us believe
in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of
things that have never been.”
That’s sort of what I’m afraid of.
It’s hard to grasp very big numbers and distant concepts.
Like imagining what all our thoughts might have been
if we lived 300 years ago. Would they be centered
on a goat or six rocks piled together
or would they be wide as they are now?
In those long-ago days,
would people be meaner to one another
or nicer? I have no idea. But sometimes I wonder what
38 billion dollars could buy, instead of weapons aimed
against us and this is what comes to mind:
Eggs. Pencils. Undershirts of very soft cotton.
Ribbons. Radios. Shining flashlights.
Handmade clay plates. Chocolates. Really soft pillows.
Baskets. Bracelets. Running shoes.
In Ramallah, optical stores polish their glittering windows
and wait patiently, stocking shiny displays,
curatives for nearsighted, farsighted, astigmatism,
too much sun. My mother’s eye swells from allergy.
Mabrook! to ourselves in the round mirrors
when suddenly the world looks sharper.
Or Tikkun Olam, as our Hebrew-speaking
brothers and sisters might say, repair for the world,
see close, see far, see how similar we are,
or could be, if the hatchets weren’t hanging over
half our heads. Tarifi Optical, “rest your eyes from the rays,”
we’d rather rest our eyes from people who can’t see us.
I’ll take wide angle please, give me the whole horizon,
citizens of magnificent olive tones, curly-headed, braided,
kaftans, grandma gowns, exercise shirts, cotton dresses,
people holding hands like a children’s book,
standing on the globe,
round as a floating pupil.
Tarifi Optical invites us to “swap inelegant squinting”—
I love their words, maybe I could be an optician,
focused on better sight for all, and work at the Ottica shop,
“premier inspiration destination”
for top brands of eyeglasses in the West Bank,
did you know we have such things?
People think of us differently.
We may be in prison, but we still love beauty.
We may be oppressed, but we are smart.
We may think we don’t need glasses, but the big E
for equality has been lying on its back
for a long time now
kicking its legs in the air like an animal
that needs help to get up.
echoes deeply
Time doesn’t just crumple
the minute you turn the calendar page
I’m not sure about a country being great
I don’t know what that means
It sounds like bragging or more weapons
I want a country to be nice to all people
Make them feel better
than people feel by themselves
Compassionate and gentle
I want people to
move more slowly
pay better attention
share what they have
In the old Palestinian tradition
everyone was invited in
Sit down, coffee or tea?
Mint in your tea?
Dates?
even if you didn’t know the visitor
America being mean to Palestine
is nothing new
reminds me of
the dark side of junior high school
those who think you can have
only one best friend
usually end up
lonely
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life