Listen to the voices of Palestine - Full collection of poems
This page was created to accompany the article “Listen to the voices of Palestine“. It comprises a series of poems by Palestinian writers that I read from October 6th - October 12th during the attacks Israel launched on Palestine and the siege it inflicted on Gaza.
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IDENTITY CARD
Written by Mahmoud Darwish in 1960.
Write down
I am an Arab
My card number is 50 000
I have eight children
The ninth will come next summer
Are you angry?
Write down
I am an Arab
I cut stone with comrade laborers
My children are eight
I squeeze the rock
To get a loaf,
A dress and a book
For them.
But I do not plead for charity at your door
And do not feel small
In front of your mansion
Are you angry?
Write down
I am an Arab
I am a name without a title
Patient, in a country
Where every body else is very angry
My roots sink deep before the birth of time
And before the beginning of the ages,
Before the time of Cypress and olives
Before the beginnings of grass,
My father belonged to the family of the plough
Was not of grand stock
My grandfather was a farmer, without a pedigree
He taught me the grandeur of the sun
Before reading books
My house is a hut
Made of reed and stalk
Are you satisfied with my rank?
I am a name without a title!
Write down
I have been robbed of my ancestral vines
And the piece of land I used to farm with all my children
Nothing remained for us and for my grandchildren
Except these rocks
Will your government take them?
So it is
Write down
At the top of the first page
I hate nobody
I do not steal anything
But when I become angry
I eat the flesh of my marauders
So beware… beware
My hunger and fury!
THE DELUGE AND THE TREE
Written by Fadwa Tuqan
When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge
Of dark evil
Onto the good green land
“They” gloated. The Western skies
Reverberated with joyous accounts:
“The Tree has fallen!
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane
Leaves no life in the tree!”
Has the Tree really fallen?
Never! Not with our red streams flowing
forever
Not while the wine of our thorn limbs
Fed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive
Tunnelling deep, deep, into the land!
When the Tree rises up, the branches
Shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
The laughter of the Tree shall leaf
Beneath the sun
And birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
THIS IS WHY WE DANCE
Written by Mohammed El-Kurd
Home in my memory is a green, worn-out couch
And my grandmother in every poem:
Every jasmine picked off the backlash,
Every backlash picked off the tear gas,
And tear gas healed with yogurt and onions,
With resilience,
With women chanting, drumming
On pots and pans
With goddamns and hasbiyallahs.
They work tanks, we know stones.
2008, during the Gaza bombings
My ritual of watching TV
Ran between grieving
And Egyptian belly dance music.
I fluctuated between hatred and adoration,
Stacking and hoarding Darwish’s reasons to live
Sometimes believing them
Sometimes dipping my bread in indulgence,
Knowing a child is breadless, in Khan Yunis,
Dipped in a roof’s rubble…
If you ask me where I’m from it’s not a one-word answer.
Be prepared, seated, sober, geared up.
If hearing about a world other than yours
Makes you uncomfortable
Drink the sea,
Cut off your ears,
Blow another bubble
To bubble your bubble and the pretense.
Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.
This is why we dance.
My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.”
Be composed, calm, still - laugh when they ask you,
Smile when they talk, answer them,
Educate them.
This is why we dance:
If I speak, I’m dangerous
You open your mouth,
Raise your eyebrows.
You point fingers.
This is why we dance:
We have wounded feet but the rhythm remains,
No matter the adjectives on my shoulders.
This is why we dance:
Because screaming isn’t free.
Please tell me:
Why is anger - even anger - a luxury to me?
BORN ON NAKBA DAY
Written by Mohammed El-Kurd
Your unkindess rewrote my autobiography
Into punch lines in guts,
Blades for tongues,
A mouth pregnant with thunder.
Your unkindness told me to push through
Look
Listen.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba
To a mother who reaped olives
And figs
And other Quranic verses ,
Watteeni wazzaytoon.
My name: a bomb in a white room,
A walking suspicion
In an airport,
Choiceless politics.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba.
Outside the hospital room
Protests, burnt rubber,
Kufffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies,
Stones thrown onto tanks,
Tanks imprinted with US flags,
Lands
Smelling of tear gas, skies tilted with
Rubber-coated bullets,
A few bodies shot, dead - died
Numbers in a headline.
I
And my sister
Were born.
Birth lasts longer than death.
In Palestine death is sudden,
Instant,
Constant,
Happens in between breaths.
I was born among poetry
On the fiftieth anniversary.
The liberation chants outside the hospital room
Told my mother
To push.
RIFQA
(excerpt)
Written by Mohammed El-Kurd
Nowadays, grandmother walks fragile,
So unlike the past she battled.
Wrinkled faces
Hide inside the wrinkles of her face,
Tell the story of that event;
Organized undying.
The morning of a red-skied May 1948
Could’ve been today.
They knocked the doors down,
Claimed life as their own.
The chances of their staying
Fragile .
But now look:
Houses are in rings, keys around necks,
Odds far from even, far from running water.
Seven decades later
They harvest organs of the martyred,
Feed their warriors our own.*
The people of Haifa left,
Some fled after news
some stayed,
gave coffee to massacre.
Some walked a straight line into the sea
back to their city
refused to be martyred
refused to exit.
They were on with Haifa,
drowned
in this life
soaked in salt.
My grandmother - Rifqa -
Was chased away from the city,
Leaving behind
The vine of roses in the front yard.
Sometime when youth was
More than just yearning,
She left poetry.
What I write is an almost.
I write an attempt.
She left behind clothes folded ready to be worn again;
Her suitcases
Did not declare departure.
*Note from RIFQA, page 18: In 2009, Swedish photojournalist Donald Bolstrom published an essay titled “Our Sons Are Being Plundered for Their Organs”, in which he exposed the decades-long Isreali practice of returning the bodies of young Palestinian men to their families with organs missing. See also: Israeli necroviolence.
NO MOSES IN SIEGE
Written by Mohammed El-Kurd
On July 16, 2014, four boys - aged between nine and fourteen -
were killed by Isael naval fire while playing soccer on a beach in
Gaza city.
Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza
that you brought us to the beach to die?
Was it because rubbling us in our houses,
like our cousins, like our futures, like our gods,
would be a bore?
Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and
our tombstones need homes?
Was it because our fathers needed more grief?
We were limbs in the wind,
our joy breaking against the shore.
Soccer ball between our feet
we were soccer in between their feet.
No place to run. No Moses in siege.
Waves stitched together, embroidered, weaved
un-walkable, indivisible, passage - implausible,
on most days we weep in advance.
We looked up to the clouds, got up on clouds.
Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus.
Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it.
What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?
ENOUGH FOR ME
Written by Fadwa Tuqan
Enough for me
Enough for me to die on her earth
Be buried in her
To melt and vanish into her soil
Then sprout forth as a flower
Played with by a child from my country.
Enough for me to remain
In my country’s embrace
To be in her close as a handful of dust
A sprig of grass
A flower.
A LETTER FROM PRISON
Written by Sameeh Al Qassem
It pains me, Mother
That you burst in tears
When my friends come
Asking about me
But I believe, mother
That the splendor of life
Is born in my prison
And I believe that my last visitor
Will not be an eyeless bat
Coming at midnight.
My last visitor must be daylight…
EVER ALIVE
Written by Fadwa Tuqan
My beloved homeland
No matter how long the millstone
Of pain and agony churns you
In the wilderness of tyranny,
They will never be able
To pluck your eyes
Or kill your hopes and dreams
Or crucify your will to rise
Or steal the smiles of our children
Or destroy and burn
Because out from our deep sorrows,
Out from the freshness of our spilled blood
Out from the quivering of life and death
Life will be reborn in you again…
A LOVER FROM PALESTINE
(excerpt)
Written by Mahmoud Darwish
Like a thorn in the heart are your eyes
Lacerating, yet adorable,
I shield them from the storm
And pierce them deep through night and pain,
The wound illuminates thousands of stars
My present makes their future
Dearer than my being
And I forget as our eyes meet
That once we were twins behind the gate.
Your words were my song
I tried to sing again
But winter settled on the rosy lip.
Your words, like a swallow, flew away,
My door and the wintry threshold
Flew away behind you, longing for you
And our mirrors broke
Sorrows grew
So we gathered the splinters of sound
But only learnt to lament the homeland
We shall plant it together
On the strings of a guitar
And on the roof of our catastrophe,
We shall play it
For distorted moons and stones
But I forget, O you whose voice I do not know
Whether it was your departure
Or my silence
That rusted the guitar.
I saw you last on the harbor
A lonely voyager without relatives
Without a bag
I ran to you like an orphan,
Asking the wisdom of the ancestors;
How could an orchard be banished
To a prison, to an exile or a harbor
And yet remain, despite the journey
And the smell of salts or yearnings,
Ever green?
I saw you at the thorny mountains
A sheepless shepherd being chased
And among the ruins
And you had been my garden
And I was a stranger
Knocking at the door, my heart
Knocking my heart…
The door, the window, the cement and the stones
Stood up.
I swear
From eye lashes I shall weave
A kerchief for you
And weave on it a poem for your eyes
I shall write on it a sentence that is
Dearer than martyrs and kisses;
“She was a Palestinian and she is still so”!
I flung the doors open to the storm
Palestinian are your eyes and tattoo,
Palestinian is your name
Palestinian are your dreams and concerns
Palestinian is your scarf, your feet, your form,
Palestinian are your words and your silence
Palestinian is your voice
Palestinian in life and in death,
I hold you in my old books
A fire for my songs
OH RASCAL CHILDREN OF GAZA
Written by Khaled Juma
Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window.
Who filled every morning
with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
and scream as you want
and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back…
Just come back. ♦
Accumulated between October 6th and October 12th, 2023.
Note: this page was edited on October 14th, 2023 to rearrange the order of the poems such that “Identity Card”, “The Deluge and the Tree”, “This is why we dance”, and “Born on Nakba day” are the first four poems that appear on the page. It was also edited to include the poem “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza” at the end of the page.