I am Sheikh Jarrah.
Thereâs a spear in my waist
and spears in my back.
My resilience is an edifice.
I am Jerusalemâs northern gate.
When treachery occurs,
I am fields of coal
and the wind will certainly blow
in the direction my ships covet.
âMaysoon Abu Dweih El-Kurd
ONE
In Jerusalem
God has become a refugee, sir.
âRashid Hussein
âFireworks or bombs?â
Loren often asked
in fresh, concerned American breath.
Iâd respond with âA wedding, probably,â
or âThere are no weddings in December.â
After sheâs worn Jerusalem
and been worn by it,
âFireworks or bombs?â
Loren asks. A giggling tornado
escapes our mouths
touched by our numbness
in fatal ways.
My mother has always said:
âThe most tragic of disasters
are those that cause laughter.â
WHO LIVES IN SHEIKH JARRAH?1
Born on Nakba Day2
Your unkindness rewrote my autobiography
into punch lines in guts,
blades for tongues,
a mouth pregnant with
thunder.
Your unkindness told me to push
through,
look,
listen.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba
to a mother who reaped olives
and figs
and other Quranic verses,
watteeni wazzaytoon.3
My name: a bomb in a white room,
a walking suspicion
in an airport,
choiceless politics.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba.
Outside the hospital room:
protests, burnt rubber,
Kuffiyahâed faces, and bare bodies,
stones thrown onto tanks,
tanks imprinted with US flags,
lands
smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with
rubber-coated bullets,
a few bodies shot, deadâdied
numbers in a headline.
I
and my sister
were born.
Birth lasts longer than death.
In Palestine death is sudden,
instant,
constant,
happens in between breaths.
I was born among poetry
on the fiftieth anniversary.
The liberation chants outside the hospital room
told my mother
to push.