We shall arrive once we return
I. We no longer have lines of thought
to thread them through the needle’s eye
and patch the bullet-riddled kites,
we no longer have a present
to prop the future from below
the famine-line that girds our waists
and whenever we dare sail the sea
we fare only till the muzzles
of your rifles and may return
alive on a Bloody Sunday
and we have nowhere left to go
from here, and beyond the endless
end of this death there is no beyond,
and beyond this endless exile
you give us the exiled exile
and the exile of the exiled.
II. Take the ravaged seams of our dreams,
the barbed borders of our thoughts,
the thorny air we breathe and bark
your axioms of conquest, recite
your genocidal cliches, infuse
your colonial proverbs and build
your settlements with skeletons,
but whenever you displace us
we will recite our sacred hymns
of departure and fervid songs
of arrival, and we shall prod
the memory stallions to rear
up, adorned with ululations
and ancient stories of this land,
and we pledge we’ll never arrive
until we all return and march
with naked arms through your armor,
through your deathsquads and war machine.
III. And mark my words on a wall:
we shall never arrive alone
but we’ll bring along our lovers
from every corner of the globe,
and import the antivenom
to your poisonous race-disease,
and yet, we shall not arrive until
we’ve truly become a motley
tribe like we’ve always been, adorned
with the colours of the rainbow.
Self-made pride in withstanding erasure
I. Before the moonless night could break its fast,
my uncle and I bit the morning dew, yawning;
the scant threads of light scented the sacred land
and the cocky roosters graced the rhythm
of the clomping hooves cracking the dawn
on the cobblestones to the tobacco field;
along the winding road, you could hear the walls
echo the beat, and rhyme with the peasant’s
pride that made my veins well up and pulsate.
A farmer of imperative verbs, this uncle
called monosyllabic words at the horse,
all morning he said not a word while we
were both bent on stripping tobacco leaves
off the stalks, extracting my hands black, sticky
and tarred, shrouded with premature adolescence.
He heaved the leaves onto the cart while I
climbed fig trees, just before the sun could rise,
and picked fresh figs, soft and tender like baby’s hands;
back at my aunt’s house, I could smell the baked
bread, fried eggs and olive oil, as we piled the leaves
for nephews and nieces to string them merrily
on long threads and hang them to dry, high,
close by the dark roof, on their way to the state
monopoly that governed the net worth
of all present and absent native lives.
II. I was barely eleven years and wore
the harvest-pride that only peasants wear
when I became aware of father’s stolen
pride, bereft of his village and farming fields,
despite his Ottoman land-ownership deeds,
(yellow, withered, folded carefully, wrapped
in burlap bags of farming memories);
bereft of farming nouns, deprived of verbs
of choice, he became a mason, a wright,
and taught me the pride of being self-made;
I had followed in his footsteps for years,
hammering vacation days to masons’ calendars,
cementing walls, casting labour and sweat
into wooden caskets, fleshing out
the rusted iron skeletons with wet
cement concoctions; when the cement cured
we removed the wood to reveal a new
cubicle, delivered to newcomers:
cementing the occupation of our land.
III. Sometime later, my uncle was bereft
of his land and spent his days ploughing roads
of tar for new settlements through olive groves;
my uncle and father withered away
and spent their lives wanting the peasants’ pride
I had ever felt pounding in my veins,
on a morning that has yet to return.
VI. Now I live in the verbs of forced-exile
and sojourn in the nouns of a homeland
erased, bereft of every native noun;
I am a farmer, but I have no fields.
A mason, but I use no stones. I seek
the self-made pride of native artisans.
Khalil Sima’an is a Palestinian academic and poet living in exile in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His recent poetry is nominated for Best of The Net 2025, and appeared in various poetry journals including Muzzle, ANMLY, Solstice, Clarion, Rising Phoenix and Fikra, and his earlier poetry appeared in Arabic language literary magazine Al-Jadeed and daily Al-Ittihad. Khalil works as professor of computational linguistics at University of Amsterdam.