Status Updates From Forest of Noise: Poems

Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don't mind our bodies.

I dream still about my grandfather, how much I want to pick oranges with him in Yaffa.

But my grandfather died,
Yaffa is occupied, and oranges
no longer grow
in his weeping groves.

upon birth, mask up your children and leave them unnamed so
the angel of death can’t find them

someone may ask
why not paint their faces change their names every day

a nightingale on the tree of dusk exclaims
what if both the painter and the paint
work for the angel of death

a stone near a cemetery suggests
why give birth to children at all

At fifth grade, I visit the school library.
On a wall by the door, a poster claims,
"If you read books, you live more than one life." Now I'm thirty and whenever I look at faces around me, old or young, on each forehead I read: “if you live in Gaza, you die several times.”

Every child in Gaza is me.
Every mother and father is me.
Every house is my heart.
Every tree is my leg.
Every plant is my arm.
Every flower is my eye.
Every hole in the earth is my wound.

“Poetry is not a luxury.” - Audre Lorde