Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Unsettling the colonial project of lies, Mohammed is a truth teller. 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. What I writeis an almost I writean attempt. —from “Rifqa,” p 17

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.

A poem is a life, and a life is a poem that calls us inward.

“I cried not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.” These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been.

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba to a mother who reaped olives and figs and other Quranic verses,

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

Home in my memory is a green, worn-out couch and my grandmother in every poem: every jasmine picked off the backlash, every backlash picked off the tear gas, and tear gas healed with yogurt and onions, with resilience, with women chanting, drumming on pots and pans with goddamns and hasbiyallahs. They work tanks, we know stones.

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?

Many prisons in the journey, seldom doves at the destination.

Your throat’s a minaret. The hospital bed—a prayer rug; allahu akbar, your family announces your boyhood andyour doom.

Your father was a bullet away before a bullet took him, came home a martyr never a father.

mornings of mourning on a breakfast table, olives za’atar tomatoes and cucumber tragedy tear gas and tea

her skeleton is that of the tree’s, roots stitched into land into identity.

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.

Mother picks apples from forbidden cities, hiding produce under her car seat, smuggling Bethlehem between her feet. She breezed through the military barrier what the soldiers call a checkpoint a soldier deceived—

Sing me a song of home break a dish or twothrow a stone or two because the screams make me nostalgic: I almost don’t fear the sirens.

My grandmother—Rifqa—

Omg how sweet

She left poetry. What I writeis an almost. I writean attempt.

wore her key until her keyher neckher memory became the same color.

lucky refugeegrew vines of roses around the house; this time the roses had thorns just in case.

She worked, worked, and worked until survival was a funny story to tell on eveningswith what remains of the family.

the twenty-first centurydidn’t stop the Nakba from continuing

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

yet another Nakba another divine crime scene.

now Maha’s eight.She knows her Nakba isn’t the first, she knowsshe’s not the only child whose bed was burned, she knowschildren are burned. Mohammad Abu-Khudair,sixteengasoline.

Let’s say it was devoured by the sea. Don’t worryit will wash ashore. “No matter how deep it drowns, the truth always washes ashore.”

The nurse complained of the clouds. If I were a stupid flower, I’d wither under the rain. They asked her, What’s wrong with the flower? not What’s wrong with the rain?

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? —Amal Dunqul

On July 16, 2014, four boys—aged between nine and fourteen— were killed by Israeli naval fire while playing soccer on a beach in Gaza City. 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 do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?

Stones will fling themselves in protest.

This Hebrewed land still speaks Arabic.

Whose side is God on? Some days it feels like they’ve unlocked prayer. They prey often.

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.

The boy is eight, which is twenty-two for Americans. The boy knows this. His mother calls him a man in his nightmares. You’re a man now.

War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty / rivers in their throats. American water is brown and dirtied and children famished,

Which me will survive bulldozers undoing God? Which me will soak their hands in these wells? Which me will console the dead’s loved ones with prevention, not mourning, bottle our Jordan River to smack American thirst, for greed and grief. Waterstolen or neglected. Which me will survive all these liberations?

Her whistles asleep are choppy, her lungs—I assume—were embroidered with screams, grainy and grayed.

She responds: Thank you.

bags, not as heavy as they seem not as heavy as she’s lived.

soldier, blonde and sunburnt, asks her for her permit. My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence. My smile is a sun.

Atlanta taught me that people will still applaud the bullets puncturing them if they have the right rhythm.

Atlanta taught me how to catch a train, how to miss a train, how to be a train.

This city weds its martyrs, celebrates when they come home.

Atlanta taught me that hallway-hellos are not the same as friendship.

Jerusalem taught me resilience. Atlanta taught me a different kind. I can now bring the funeral to the podium and laugh. My grandmother taught me if ...