Poems for Palestine

For my subscribers: this is a bonus post of sorts. You’ll still get the usual poem and prompt from me this weekend. I’m sharing this because I can’t not share it. I’m not very good at conducting business as usual while a genocide is being livestreamed to my phone. I’ve shared a few poems about or inspired by Gaza here on 100 Poems, but I wanted to create a space to share more of them, while also honoring the reality that many of you are in this community to get a break from the news, to find a bit of delight in your day, and to connect more deeply with your creativity. It is completely up to you if or how much you want to engage with this post. Here’s my plan, though: as I write more poems about Gaza, I’ll come back and add them to this post. As I dive deeper into the writings of Palestinian poets, I’ll return and share links here. If you’re writing poems inspired by Palestine, please share them in the comments. I would love to read them and to sit together in our grief or rage or bewilderment or in the seemingly simple but surprisingly complex question of how to show up in this world. To all of you: thank you for being here.

As I sift through the 50+ poems I’ve written so far this year, three major themes emerge over and over again: our interconnectedness with the natural world, our interconnectedness with everything else, and the genocide in Gaza. I don’t know how to feel the reality of our interconnection and not feel the bombs dropping on the Gaza Strip, the hunger carving away at the insides of children, the fear and grief of the 1.5 million men, women, and children with hearts and lungs and longings, sheltering in Rafah, mourning their dead, and wondering whom they will lose next.

I’m creating this post as a place to share my own poems about Palestine, a place to begin my exploration of the work of Palestinian poets, and a space in which to invite you, dear reader, to share your own poems for Palestine or to link to poetry you’ve read elsewhere. General discussion on the relationship between art and activism is also very welcome here.

Every interaction I’ve had on Substack so far has been positive and respectful, so hopefully this next bit goes without saying, but I’d rather err on the side of caution. This is not a space for expressing anti-Semitism. I’m using the commonsense, every-day-speech definition of anti-Semitism here: prejudice against or hatred of Jews. I reject the notion that anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism. The collapsing of these terms into one does harm to Palestinians and Jews alike.

Palestinian Poets

The voices of Palestinian poets are new to me. I am only just beginning to learn. My plan is to continue reading and learning, returning to this post to add links and resources as I go along. For now, here are a couple of resources worth taking your time with:

• Literary Hub’s December 2023 post entitled “These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza”

• Arab Lit’s post entitled “Palestinian Poems with and for the Now,” which includes information about and poems from several dozen Palestinian poets.

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

My Palestine-Inspired Poems

These are certainly not the best poems ever written for or about Palestine, but writing them does a few things: it helps me to process my own grief and rage so that I can turn toward the atrocities and toward my empathy and desire to help, rather than numbing and turning away. Writing these poems helps me to keep on holding Gaza in my awareness, even though that hurts. It collapses the psychological distance between me and each and every Gazan; I feel in my whole body that we are kin.

When your family is under attack, you do something. Writing these poems gives me the strength and clarity to take action for Gaza in other ways—calling my representatives, for example, making donations, initiating awkward conversations, boycotting businesses that support Israel, and (when my body cooperates) attending protests. I am not the most engaged citizen of the world. But I’m far more engaged than I was a year ago. Writing these poems is helping me to grow into activism at a pace that I can sustain. I hope that reading them will feel helpful to you in some of these same ways. You may notice in reading them that most of the poems have an unspoken audience, and in most cases, the audience I pictured while writing looks a lot like me: white, relatively educated, and liberal. It’s certainly not my job to lead the movement for a free Palestine, but maybe I can follow, and maybe I can bring a few friends along with me. That hope is at the heart of most of these poems.

If you are writing poems for or about Gaza, I would love to read them and love for others to be able to access them, as well! Please share them in the comments thread. Ditto for links to Palestine-inspired poetry by other writers.

Photo by levarTravel on Unsplash

Bisan

You are 6,244 miles from me.
That’s 3 planes and a bus away,
29 hours if all goes well,
which probably, it wouldn’t. 
But the border walls
are breaking down,

distances collapsing. 
I hold you now
in the palm of my hand and
watch your lips form
pleas for help.
I do this

until I can’t.
Until I need rest
or water or food or
pleasant distraction,
an hour in the woods—
all the things you don’t have.  

Even when I swipe you
out of sight, you’re still here,
burning in my pocket,
waiting
under the rubble of
my cushy discomfort,

waiting for me to notice
that 29 hours
is no time at all,
that 6,000 miles
is nothing but empty space
between your beating heart
and mine.  

Questions Shaped Like Names

Thick gauze wraps around his tiny head,
white halo on black hair.
“Baba!” he cries and is lifted
into the warm sky of a father’s arms.

“My love, my boy,” the man cries, and
he is really crying. I would, too—
working all night there in the hospital
then finding my own child among the wounded.

“Did they bomb the house?” he asks. 
The angel bobs his head,
and his father wails
like a siren.

He was staunching bleeding
and stitching wounds. 
Now all he can do is shape names
into questions.

“Where is Mama?”
“Where is Motaz?”
The bandaged boy points to the heavens,
and the sky is crumbling.

Baba weeps the words again and again—
“Mama, where’s Mama?”
I can hear his sobs from six thousand miles away.
How long does it take

for air to travel the globe?
How long until we are all
breathing Rafah? 
I walk the fields and beseech the ground— 

what do I need to let go of
so that I can hold all of this?
Three does leap from the brush,
their tails waving white flags.

I am startled by delight,
am startled, again, to find
that such a feeling is possible
under this sky,

against this ground.  
I surrender any pretense
to understanding.
I tip from grief to joy

and back again.
I am laughing.
I am crying. 
Maybe this tipping

is the way to hold it all,
weights counterbalanced
on the sides of my body.
A way to stay upright

instead of hunching
into half my humanity. 
My dog bounds ahead
then halts abruptly,

thorns tangled against his leg.
I prick my finger 
to set him free. 
If I prick nine more,

will it see you free?
How many hands
do you need and
how much holding?

How many voices raised
to the pitch of sirens
until 
finally 

the only thing
dropping over Gaza
is a white flag,
an olive branch,
sackcloth against the ashes
of all that’s burned? 

Erasure

If you want to erase a people,
a sensible step is to
strip them from their ground.
Pollute the water on which
all life depends,
Destroy the soil from which
their customs grow,
Fell the birds
whose songs inspire
the people’s own. 
Bomb their houses,
loot their lives.
Call it self-defense. 

Does such talk
ruffle your feathers?
Would you rather think
of pleasant things?

History is being written,
and history is being erased,
and we are all choosing—
whether to be the sharp discomfort 
at the pencil’s tip,

or to smudge
into complicity
with the pink end
of the sword.

The Darkest Super Bowl Poem Ever

No one wants to watch the dance
of the dying 
or hear their wailing song. 
But if Gazans would just 
put on roller skates—

master, the tempest is raging

when nature displaces
we use the language
of violence
of hunger and greed
angry oceans, ravenous fires,
furious storms

when we displace
our own
we favor different terms
progress
we say, or
cleaning things up
necessity
security
will of god

What Next?

We keep doing
the same dumb thing,
by which I mean oppressing
and killing each other,
oppressing and killing the very earth
on which we stand
or sit
or slump. 

Yet every day the sky
unfurls above us, a banner
completely new.
Clouds, light, darkness
like I’ve never seen them before,
and all our exhalations

suspend in the air,
a sea of droplets
held together in 
quivering wonder,
waiting to see
what we’ll do
with our next
dumb breath. 

Thirst

The moss cannot
drink the light
unless it’s sipped
some water first,
but lies in wait
for dew to come,
closed like cracking lips. 

The moss can stay here,
black and parched,
alive and seeming dead,
then with the rain,
be reborn,
lush and unafraid. 

We are not
such resilient types,
and when the water’s gone,
we wither,
and if we live at all,
we’re scarred
by what is gone. 

So please think twice 
or a hundred times
before you lift
that hurting hand. 
Please feel twice
or a thousand times
this drought
that you command. 

Just the One Thing

I know it seems impossible,
and that is how
they want it to seem.

I know it seems hopeless,
and who has spoons to spare
for hopeless things, so I understand

if you hoard your minutes
and guard your caring,
clutch them like cards
against your careful chest.

I see your fear.
I see your guilt.
I see your fear and guilt and 
raise you love. 

I know it seems impossible,
the powers that be are
too entrenched—
that belief
is so entrenched
we overlook its power.
It drones in our heads. It
breaks the earth apart.
It keeps us busy
with a thousand nothings 
when all that’s needed
is just the one thing—

to be a drop 
in the tidal transformation
for which our child hearts
are screaming. 

When enough of us wake
from our white noise slumber
into bodies that love
more than they fear, 
to ears that hold 
the screaming of children,
the ones inside us and the
ones who crouch
bleeding and hungry
against the ground
that yields to our spades
and deals us
daffodils,

then we will band together
like children, before
they learn to hate.
We will dream the impossible
like children, before
they learn despair.
We will shout and sing
in our outside voices. We will
color past every picture
in shades so bold
the lines disappear. We will
break the rules of
rigged games and
make the world
new. 

But first,
I must be a drop,
and you must be a drop.

Every bead of water pulls beads of water.
This is how a wave is built. 

This
is how
we do
the impossible. 

If you’ve read this far, thank you for holding space for me, but more importantly, thank you for holding space for Gaza. I’ve heard so may people say that they can’t engage—can’t watch what’s happening, can’t agitate for change—because it’s too much for their nervous systems or their mental health. I understand this. There are seasons in my life when that might have been my experience and perspective, too. More and more, though, I believe that our willingness to show up for others is a mirror of our willingness to show up for ourselves—and vice versa. We cannot deeply feel grief for others while hiding from our own grief (not for long, anyway). On the other hand, we cannot fully feel our own personal grief without cracking open at least a little to the grief of others. I wonder, then, if at least for some people, turning toward the pain of Palestinians might actually be a tiny (admittedly counterintuitive) step in the direction of personal healing. Feelings are there to be felt, after all.

Whatever feelings and realities you are holding or struggling beneath today, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you.

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