When a Palestinian is Lucky
Baba carried weariness and longing,
Always knowing
That home was never to be felt again
After the day he left.
How did it feel to be dispossessed twice?
Luck
Was the direction in which my Grandmother fled
Our people’s Nakba.
Luck gave my Baba weariness and longing,
Tinged with life.
Love Letter to Baba
Baba loved
With all his being.
He counted stars,
And flowers,
And books.
He counted Dunums lost,
The many hours it took
To walk to school and back,
The soap bars he cut.
He counted
Pencils,
An eraser,
Just one,
That he would have to use again
The next year.
Dimples on a dark-haired girl,
The figs he pulled off trees,
The pages he drew on,
His mother’s bracelets,
Sold,
So he may fly.
The time it took for his return—
He counted
The walls,
The checkpoints,
The barricades,
The words with which he taught me
How to love.
He counted bloodlines—
And the stars,
The hours it took to drive to homeland,
The words of poems
That we both loved—
And comrades—dead and lost.
Then gave his sums
To me.
We Learnt their Words
We learnt their words,
Thinking these will shield us.
We learnt their words –
Their peace,
Their democracy,
Their capitalism,
Their individualism.
Some of us even lived the violence of the word
'Assimilate,'
To water down who you are,
For some,
To forget who you are.
We learnt their words –
Rights,
Freedom,
Thinking they encompass us.
We reach for words not ours,
And neglect our own,
Words that scaled the walls of Akka,
Our words that salted the sea.
The words of my Baba:
Watan,
1وطني,
2موطني.
He gave me the root of homeland in the three-lettered
3وطن,
And the abhorrent
4مستوطن, derived from Watan,
Derived, supplanted,
Apt.
We learnt their words.
How could they ever govern our existence,
When all their words combined
Could never spell
A homeland in وطن.
______
1 My homeland—root Watan
2 My homeland of origin (derived from same root—Watan)
3 Watan
4 Settler on a foreign land. Of significance because the root word is still Watan, but the addition of 4 letters makes it as far as possible from the root of homeland, so as to even grammatically show an interloper. Mus-taw-tin.
Promise of Return
To you who did not know,
We did not choose exile.
You assume
That we left the whispers of the nightingales
And songs of our pomegranates,
The blessed sun-dried zaatar on our rooftops,
Willingly.
You,
Who do not know
The violence of separation
From the soil that holds our souls–
Severed,
Transplanted,
Taken,
With impunity–
Think that we left willingly,
Like you might leave
A lover,
Or an untrodden path,
With some regrets
That die down with time.
Instead, for us,
The chokehold of passing time
Continues.
Longing extends
Like embers lit
From the first of us
Who bore the guillotine
Of exile,
Excised.
Yet we,
Extend
Longing,
Love,
Songs of freedom,
Calling to our nightingales
In chants.
Growing pomegranate seeds in our bellies,
We bless zaatar with our hands
And beckon our Sun to witness.
The first of us
Did not leave willingly,
But willingly,
We await
And we shall,
Like the sunrise,
Return.
We Have the Poets
They have the guns,
Sir,
But we have the poets.
They fight to kill;
We resist to live.
They mean to erase us,
But they do not know
Of the steadfastness
We hold,
And the promise of our return.
They light Christmas trees halfway around the world
5يسوع is born
Under the rubble
Bloodied
Lungs burning
First breath throttled
With gifts of white phosphorus
The morning star—Phosphorus
And the remnants of Ash
From yesterday's mattress
There were no wise men
No myrrh and frankincense
No hymns
Mariam
Weeps,
Thorns encircle
Crowns of zaatar and sage
Phosphorus
Named the morning star
Lungs burning
He did not live long enough
To see
He bled
No wise men came
No myrrh and frankincense
No hymns
No church bells ring
The sky was Ash
Mariam Weeps.
______
5 Jesu
Noor Mo'alla is a Palestinian poet in the diaspora, a grandchild to Nakba survivors. Her first poetry book was given by her father when she was seven—an anthology of Mahmoud Darwish's work, starting with ‘Write down, I am an Arab’. Two things were learned by her then: the irrepressible longing for her homeland, and how words stretched and filled a void to express this longing. Interweaving the personal and political, Mo'alla's writing is not just an act of expression, but a means of carrying forward the enduring spirit of her people—and a promise of writing their liberation into being.