When the empires come for you you learn to hide it all You learn to wind it inside strands of cloth each clank of the loom a closing door turn the spoon around the bowl clockwise then counter add your spells into a pot of soup, a cup of tea, something they can’t force you to live without tell it to your children at bedtime until the shadows grow long in the corner of the room, open the doors and walk out into the hills Your underground means you’re underground They didn’t try to bury us but annihilate us some seeds die in the dark of the soil and some take well to burning You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it The key to the land of the dead is inside a seed we will return there each year write your prayers in a new language and bend it to your will keep it inside a filigreed silver box around your neck A blue bead a blue thread to embroider the flag of an invisible indivisible nation onto your dress You learn to sing in a secret language for the prisoner’s ear only In the end, what is left of every empire? A few coins, a few iron nails rusting in the bottom of the river, half remembered monuments and names But our shadows are still striding the hills at dusk and the wind moves through our olive trees
Why I Love Secrets and Lies
You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it
Gaza, I Wish We’d Meet Under Better Circumstances
I first met the Gaza Strip on a television screen back in 2004, at eleven years old.
To Live Free
To colonizing propagandists, our story is the American Dream. To us, it’s an ongoing tragedy.
My Gifts from Gaza
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.
Three Poems
I’m against my country’s revolutionaries / Wounding an ear of wheat / Against the child / Any child / Holding a grenade
I am the stranger
I am the stranger / The shadow beneath the cloud / Adrift and looming over my land
(out of borders)
He wears winter and searches for another land, / Where he will say to the raining clouds, / To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know. / Hope was the last breath of the traveler, / Hope was his land.
Why I Love Secrets and Lies
You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it
In October, the sky turned white
Why are these babies asking too much when they demand nothing but the most basic human rights?
A Farm in Gaza
My grandma had a farm in Gaza where her children played outside. Only her two oldest sons remember living there.
Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]
We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.
For the Dead Among Us
We will open the day for you, and the night. We know that you are beneath the earth, or ash
A Few Lines
At a hospital-turned-housing-shelter, a father wept, cradling his newborn son at the gate of Al Shifa hospital.
I Was Imagining
Planes claim the sky; claim mothers and fathers, / Claim dreams, futures, one last kid's hope