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.

Still, liberation is not a media strategy. It is a matter of life and death.

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.

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

Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been.

“The most tragic of disasters are those that cause laughter.”

The term Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) refers to the occupation of 78 percent of Palestine through ethnic cleansing and massacres and the creation of “Israel” on that territory in 1948. The Palestinian people commemorate the Nakba on May 15th every year.

Your ambition is ammunition

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.

“No matter how deep it drowns, the truth always washes ashore.”

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

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

Female rap is the highest form of poetry.

My grandmother taught me if we don’t laugh, we cry.

It is thosestuffing sand inmy mouth that worry me mostsaying there aresofterwaystosaythis. Thing is I don’t want to be soft. Don’t want to humanize shit.

What is a fact in Arabic is debatable in English,

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

You can purchase children here.

Matters not what children sell for but that they are sold.

G4S is a security contractor with a strong presence in the Israeli government. It helps run prisons, police training centers, checkpoints, settlements and military bases. Though it is contracted to provide equipment and services to Israeli prisons, G4S is deeply complicit in Israeli use of mass incarceration. Many of the 500–700 Palestinian children who are arrested, detained and prosecuted by “Israel” are held in G4S-equipped prisons.

There is no poetry in suicide

Audre Lorde’s “Movement Song.”

Who took poets off my shelves to put pills where poets once were?

Washington spat on Mandela a few breaths before it kissed him.

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

men emasculated by refugee status.

A dozen Kyle Rittenhouses patrol my street.

The settlers stole our chairs, and the cops sat on them.

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

We don’t want your sympathy, we want your action,

“Palestine’s jasmine tree,” and much like the trees, my grandmother died standing.

Be patient! For after patience comes relief! My grandmother responded, After patience comes the grave!

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

although this book isn’t an attempt to free Palestine, its central thesis is that Palestine, in its historical entirety, must be liberated by any means necessary.

Dareen Tatur, who was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment after she’d shared a poem titled “Resist, My People Resist”