The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems

by Hala Alyan

It is not enough to say love in Arabic. You must say be the thing that buries me,

said, We just bought this house, I wanted to be happy in it, and you looked at me strange and said, A good house can carry anguish, and this is how I think of bodies now too.

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. 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.

The year is —as told by Nafez Alyan 1977 and Sadat has gone to the Knesset. Every television in every living room :: the problem, the Palestinians, the peace, what peace

Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.

Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.

I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did

You speak of nostalgia like you’re the only one who ever lost something,

Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love.

In the darkest dark, I wait for the moon that turns you back.

Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.

I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.