Cento for Falasteen
from works by Hasheemah Afaneh, laila r. makled, Yousef Abu-Salah, Rashid Hussain (translated by Salma Harland), Bassam Jamil (translated by Nicole Mankinen), Rania Lardjane, Hani Albayarie, Summer Awad, Veera Sulaiman, Suzana Sallak, Nama’a Qudah, Michael Jabareen, Alia Yunis, Yara Ghabayen, Aiya Sakr, Edward Salem, Ahmad Mallah, Kat Abdallah, Liane Al Ghusain, Priscilla Wathington, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Farah Alhaddad, Mikhail de Parlaine, Bader Alzaharna, and Fady Joudah.
The air around me is clogged with dust, my lungs feed on cement; my mouth, on rocks.
Black curls melt onto fracturing cheeks. People are running out on the streets and they are still bombing the buildings there.
They called us: Human-animals Collateral damage Casualties Uncivilized Third world people Terrorists
~
God said (and already you can tell I’m making this up), If you lift a rock, I am there.
At first, some screams echoed from within the rubble, and then everything went
silent.
Mustafa said he couldn’t recognize his own brother; the faces he had looked at his whole life were wiped of all features.
We love our Lebanese mountains and Palestinian hills so deeply that they mistook us for stones. We were so identified with the olive and cedar trees, they thought us inanimate. Unalive. A land
without a people. Never
allowed to return, I fumble
to find holes for the past to not be
a bleeding visitor who asks why the ambulance never arrives.
~
I write in English, feeling a rising tension between myself and the language. The words feel strange, empty,
unable.
(Is this a disappearing game or stretching membrane?)
I’m against my child becoming a hero at ten against the tree flowering explosives against the branches becoming gallows against the flowerbeds becoming trenches against it all but
which fire will keep me from what is mine?
Sage in the fall, grape leaves in the spring, and rooted year-round in our family trees –pomegranate, fig, apricot, almond, orange. Before planting each of those trees, Sedo would kiss the seed, imbuing it with a piece of his soul.
Your names are the only language that holds any meaning.
~
There’s no point in turning the page on the calendar. The ninety-year old as registered in the documents of the colonizer’s archive is still fifteen, and the one who is seventy-five years old in the colonizer’s documents was actually born today, yesterday, tomorrow. They were all born and are all being born here.
The almost dead wakes up, dies, dreams and breaks
smiling.
You learn to sing in a secret language for the prisoner’s ear only -
We, those of us not from Gaza, never meet Gaza as she’s rebuilding herself. We, those of us not from Gaza, have yet to meet Gaza not under siege.
~
I see how he holds a maimed toddler in his left arm while driving an ambulance with his right, how he sits on the sidewalk, head against the remaining wall of a store, gazing blankly toward the fiery sky.
When the empires come for you you learn to hide it all.
Ash. Spells. Funeral bells. Candles on our mantlepieces and in our hearts: Please,
_do not leave us. Stay with us._
Hell is reading their messages and not being able to do a thing.
~
It’s not as easy as it used to be to be alone with the earth.
Children don't play outside anymore. They play in hospitals and shelters, dark circles around their precious little eyes. God is Palestinian, and we have all killed him, snuffed him out, missile by missile.
_But which fire_
_will keep me_
_from what is mine?_
Hope was the last breath of the traveler, hope was his land. That cramped room
in Ummi’s house in Gaza was my cathedral. The symphony of creaking floorboards, downstairs arguments, and wobbling window sills its choir.
I tell them Ramallah is the most beautiful,
and that beauty compels you to forget
their ugliness and that of your own. We keep
waiting for justice, the light of recognition
that makes the world whole: _we see you and love_
_you as you are_
I am
spent yet full of readiness. The fire drinks from my eyes. The roots of my land
absorb me