Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Palestinians are not the only people to suffer at the hands of settler colonialism and Western white terrorism. Yet we cannot afford to stay quiet about what is taking place there.

The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are a crimes against all of humanity. The state is the worst of the human spirit manifested into a fully functioning government.

He wields his arsenal: a living room of poems seats us in the home of what remains, what cannot be photographed or tweeted but is in the spirit of enduring strength, the will to fight, to create, and, most importantly, to love.

A poem is a life, and a life is a poem that calls us inward. What a poem becomes in our innermost spaces is a land that cannot be owned, though it can be cared for, tended to, and loved.

We are more than what was done to us; we are who we’ve become in spite of it all. Who do we choose to be, and what will we do about it?

As I write this, our family lawyer is attempting to persuade a settler judge to rule against settlements: a zebra at the mercy of a jury of hyenas.

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