17 May 2021
Victoria, BC
Dear Poemgranates,
Rana and I meet for coffee at the SUB these days. Rana has returned and quarantined and I have been speechless for the span of over a month since she sent me the picture of water and land on the other side, saying “This is the closest point I can reach.” Now we sit with our coffees and Rana shows me how to write Arabic. It isn’t just a picture of water and land on the other side, is it? It is the water and the land. It is Palestine.
I turn the page over and show her how to write the Kannada script, and in this language with no definite article, I write: ನದಿಯಿಂದ ಸಮುದ್ರದ ವರೆಗೆ. From river to sea. I think that lack of the definite article colours my grief here. In “Sea of Darkness” tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Najwan Darwish calls it, “a corpse from which all of creation is dripping.” Which river? Which sea? We have been apathetic to Palestinians at every shore.
Rana and I meet for coffee at the SUB these days and we are not meeting because the State of Israel is carrying out airstrikes in Gaza. We are not meeting despite it. We are meeting for coffee here in Victoria and the IDF is bombing Palestinians in Gaza. This is an insidious simultaneity. This is an insidious simultaneity I want to break; Rana has seen enough breaking so she doesn’t think this. How have we not been stilled yet? How are we seeing Palestinians tweet their last words and somehow then going about our lives? In “Running Orders,” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha knows what Palestinians must prove before their murderers: “Prove you’re human. / Prove you stand on two legs. / Run.”
There is a protest in Victoria on 20 May at 5.00 pm at the BC Legislature. There is a brief poem attributed to Marwan Makhoul: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / & in order to hear the birds / the airplane must be silent.” I invite you to think about both.
Rana and I meet for coffee at the SUB and I think of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem for his mother. A poem that starts with “I long for my mother’s bread / My mother’s coffee” can only end with “Give me back the star maps of childhood / So that I / Along with the swallows / Can chart the path / Back to your waiting nest.” Here, we talk about phonecalls and poems. And Palestine.
Rana and I meet for coffee at the SUB because Darwish later said elsewhere, “They can aim sea, sky, and earth at me, but they cannot root the aroma of coffee out of me.” In the shock of a picture of longing and land, I wrote a poem in long pauses of speechlessness wishing Rana home.
Jericho
when the historian asks of the earth beneath your feet
that has been (s)wept away like an oriental carpet
he is asking if you can draw dots and call it a map.
you can’t. but you can see all of history in a bridge
lined with explosives and built on earth where we learned
first to welcome and to share food. now they dig there: were
you born nine thousand years before your bones or
only eight? did you live in circular dwellings
or rectangular? did you pottery? did you kneel to pray?
and when you fall to earth like a homing bird will you lie
in Grave A IV in the Louvre or some other alphabet?
there is no bridge in the picture— only the vast longing
of the Dead Sea and across the water, Jericho.
a man on firm ground is shrieking at the homing bird
he asks, can you draw a map from memory
of where you cannot go?
Please take a minute with these poems. From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.
Ever yours,
ALHS
The Poemgranates Archive 