Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

There is what words can do, and there is what is beneath the words: the fire and fury of what willed them into existence.

We are made up by those we love, and it is by our relationships with people that we are transformed.

Solidarity is a feeling and a doing. It is a series of choices we make with one another.

Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an ...

The freest people on earth are not controlled by hatred or fear but moved by love and truth.

We are more than what was done to us; we are who we’ve become in spite of it all.

“I cried not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.”

home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar.

Home is where we go to remember and revisit who w...

My name: a bomb in a white room, a walking suspicion in an airport, choiceless politics.

Birth lasts longer than death. In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.”

Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

Separation is like unmaking love ungluing names to places undoing God.

A soldier as old as a leaf born yesterday pulls a trigger on a woman older than his heritage.

Invaderscame back once again, claimed the land withfists and fireexcusesbeliefs of the chosen and the promised as if God is a real-estate agent.

I cried—not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.

she knowsshe’s not the only child whose bed was burned, she knowschildren are burned.

nameless faces remembered on her wrinkled face.

Do not reconcile even if they gift you gold. If I were to gouge out your eyes and place gems in their place would you still see?

Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza that you brought us to the beach to die?

Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus. Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it.

What is fear to the ferocious?

My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence.

One day we will write about dispossession in the past tense.

“How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen-hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons away, a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyxiation.

I live by people whose mattressesare memory,

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. —Malcolm X

She remembers seven decades later what martyred her homeland the first time.

They keep chanting for our death.

My grandmother lived through wars and then some. She was older than Zionist colonization.

During the 1948 Nakba, she left her Haifa home meticulously clean, not knowing she was readying it for its colonizers.

Some people cannot exist in the past tense.

Some people just do not die.

She had inserted herself into my interpretations. She became my moral compass. I’d measured everything by the tragedy she so stubbornly refused.

I learned that poetry is planting a bomb in a garden—a masquerade. Language is not free.

In contrast, we must qualify our dead with reminders of their nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilites.