[ ∙∙∙ ]

Your grandeur is your insignificance.

Artwork by Fadia Jawdat 
The patience that takes your heart out 
into the wilderness. The impatience 
that undresses you in a crowd.

Both are tears, flowing or still 
in your artesian well.

This is what faith taught you. 
This way, art. That way, God. This way 
hierarchy dissolves. 

Your grandeur is your insignificance.
And the whole world 

in an atom in the mind, 
the atom compounding, 
transmitting a world.

It’s not as easy as it used to be
to be alone with the earth.

Garden, I choose you, 
you are the time 
I want to lose.
Palestinian children, 1967
Palestinian children, 1967, shared with us by the poet.

Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Arab American Book Award, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement Prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Fadia Jawdat

Fadia H. Jawdat was born in Beirut, Lebanon of Palestinian parents. She has a B.A. in Fine Arts and a Masters in Communications Design. She currently lives and works in Washington, DC. To learn more, please visit her website: www.fadiajawdat.com.

‹Also in this Issue›
My Gifts from Gaza

Yousef Abu-Salah

Baba once mentioned how Palestinians were the patient dough of the Taboon. No matter how much we are kneaded, beaten, and stretched beyond our limits, our capacity for hope is supernatural. Taboon, even burnt beyond recognition, is still Taboon.