Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Solidarity is a feeling and a doing. It is a series of choices we make with one another. It can only be felt. It cannot be contrived or manipulated. Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an energetic force and a resounding love.

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

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

If you ask me where I’m from it’s not a one-word answer. Be prepared seated, sober, geared up.

If hearing about a world other than yours makes you uncomfortable, drink the sea, cut off your ears, blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense. Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.

My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.” Be composed, calm, still—laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk, answer them, educate them.

This is why we dance: Because screaming isn’t free. Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

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

Here, every footstep is a grave, every grandmother is a Jerusalem.

I talked to God but God never wore my shoes.

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

Fifteen-year-old girl denounced. Violence is not children taking on dragons.

People who give excuses for executions fear the rifle more than they fear the reason.

A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle? Another fed him a sonnet. If Shakespeare was from here he wouldn’t be writing.

If I squeezed their bread in my hand, my blood would drip out of it. You and I became the other, the minority.

The comedy, though, is in the language. The things they deafen and defeat. They renamed the streets, the tombs. Hell, whole cemeteries. You want to tell them how our feet take on to the streets? You want to tell them what land means to us? They couldn’t run in my rhetoric. Run as in rule, as in campaign, as in sprint.

They brought divinity to the crime scene to avoid justice.

We’re mere words on their resumes. The TSA people are way nicer. These people make me feel in third person.

He couldn’t believe I’m from there, called me a flower in cement, earth erupting from a rock. What a miracle. What a thing pretending has become. I stood on the roof and assassinated all the adjectives.

We should continue to call our dead martyrs.

Suheir Hammad told megrief the teacher. I saidgrief the thief.

They think they’re the only ones with PTSD.We’re literate in peeling off our own skin to sleep.

We live like walking debris, swallow snakes, swallow whole pharmacies, wrap our spines around the fingers of bank tellers, while Bush is at a Joanne’s picking the perfect blue.

as they claimed our land as theirs by divine decree. As if God were a real estate agent.

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