Refaat Alareer. Palestinian professor and writer. Assassinated by the state of Israel. Rest in Power.
Category: Art as Resistance
Only Two Things
An excerpt from Mosab Abu Toha’s November 6 essay in The New Yorker. Toha is a renowned Palestinian author who was kidnapped by Israeli forces, just a few days ago, at a military checkpoint along with about 200 other Palestinian men.
My brother-in-law Ahmad suggests that we set out on our bikes to find my father. After only three hundred metres, we see him, his head tilted downward while he pedals.
My father tells me later that debris covered every inch of the street that led to our house. He did not feed his fifteen ducks, thirty hens, five rabbits, and six pigeons. “Maybe some are alive and stuck under the rubble,” he says. But, after he saw the bombed house and heard the frightening whirring of drones, he headed back to the camp.
When we get “home,” we all sit on the floor. It’s not until later that I start to realize: I lost not only my house and its rooms but also my new clothes and shoes and watches. My books, too.
Continue reading “Only Two Things”My Name
By Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. Thank you to Linda Sarsour for posting on social media.
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn’t bleed
if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt
if it’s exposed to heat
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
so I can take comfort in seeing
my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep
Because God is Kind of Blue
By Johari Jabir
a little Palestinian boy, walking to school in Gaza
encountered an Israeli soldier driving a U.S. – made tank
Looking up into the soldier’s eyes, the little boy said,
“Mr. American President, when you look at me, would you say
he could have been my son,
like President Obama said of Trayvon Martin
meanwhile, a little black girl,
in a studio apartment in north St. Louis
waiting for her father to pour milk into her bowl of captain crunch cereal,
turned her gaze toward the tv,
where images of fire and smoke rained down on gaza
“daddy,” she said,
“is god blue?”
I Grant You Refuge
By Hiba Abu Nada. Re-posted from Protean Magazine. This poem was written on October 10th and is among the last pieces she composed before being martyred by an Israeli airstrike on October 20th. Huda Fakhreddine translated it from the original Arabic.
1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket
from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.
Try to Make it to the Morning
By Hala Alyan, a poem called “The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion,” re-posted from Literary Hub (October 17, 2023)
“They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked
Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear
By Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, from his collection Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022)
i
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.
You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.
A New World
From Jordan Leahy, a therapist, father, photographer, birder and theologian in Charlottesville, VA. Follow his work on Instagram at consider.thebirds.
The Journey
Thank you, Mary Oliver.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Who Do YOU Say I am?
From the creative, satirical pen of Ken Sehested, the curator of prayerandpolitiks.org
Radical Discipleship 