Half a world away from me
they are killing a people they claim does not exist
using my taxes, my country’s ghoulish gifts —
our bullets and bone-eating phosphorous,
our bombs, and our blessing to use them —
they are killing the doctors to kill all hope of healing
they are killing the journalists to kill all calls for justice
and what can I do? With what can I fight
to end this nightmare I’m complicit in
by birthright?
All I have, it seems to me, are words.
I scrawl them on protest signs,
arrange them into stilted, inept poems,
deposit them into the answering machines
of politicians who persist
in signing over all our souls for oil.
they are killing the old women
with nothing left to their names
but tales of how things were
and, God! they are killing the children
who listen to the tales and spin
them into dreams of how things yet could be
And what, in God’s name, can I do? What
can all the words
winging forth from all the corners of the earth
do?
what dream can rise unscathed from so much ruin?
what song is not drowned out
by the drones’ constant humming?
I pull up a lecture by Refaat Alareer
who believed in the power of a poem
to soar above the rubble
crushing its poet’s corpse.
they are killing the poets
whose words are seeds are kites are embryonic deeds
In the lecture, his voice speaks
to me from beyond the grave, haunted
by that soft electric hum
endemic, it seems, to classrooms all over.
In the lecture, he is saying
there was an Israeli general
for whom one poem by Fadwa Tuqan
packed a punch more potent than the guns
of twenty enemy fighters.
In the lecture, he is pleading:
“Don’t ever say Tuqan was arrested
‘just’ for writing poems”
and how could I, how could I
do anything but promise him, “I won’t!”
when he himself was killed a month ago
“just” for nurturing the poems in others,
“just” for reeling those poems out,
slim and supple as kites, into the world?
what song or verse, what thin prophetic cry
can scale a wall eight meters high?
one built to be buffeted, bombed — and still fly.
In the lecture, he is promising
as long as we can imagine Palestine free,
we can unlock that future reality
from a classroom that is rubble now —
the IDF bombed his university in October.
They say it was an important Hamas site.
Maybe it was
or maybe it was a danger “just” because
its teachers, its students, kept slipping their poems
past checkpoint gates
filling the world with prophecies of freedom
that “just” might make
a battered but persistent people free.
they can kill children women journalists
they can kill doctors dreamers prophets poets
but still (we must believe!) the poem lives on.
So take up your pen, or take up Gaza’s song
and spread the word forth: Palestine lives on.
Please feel free to spread this poem around online or offline. Just credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.
You can find me reciting this poem in video format on TikTok here and on Instagram here.
If you’re interested in more poetry for Palestine, check out my podcast episode here.
About this poem:
These last few months, I have been reading a great deal of Palestinian poetry. Poems are my heart’s language, and I have been deeply moved by the long proud history of Palestine’s resistance poets, who have used their art to defy the colonialist lie that there is no Palestinian people or culture. For decades, these poets have been targeted by Israel’s government because the power of their words cannot be denied.
Before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7, 2023, Professor Refaat Alareer was a professor of creative writing and world literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he worked to nurture his people’s creative powers and broadcast Palestinian poetry to the world through efforts like the We Are Not Numbers project.
Many of Alareer’s lectures are available on YouTube; around nine minutes into an introduction to poetry, he discusses how art helps us imagine what we have never experienced so that we can work to make those dreams reality. In it, he speaks to his students:
“We’ve never been to other parts of Palestine because of the Israeli occupation, but we’ve been told so many times by our parents and grandparents, especially our mothers, have been telling us stories about Palestine…the good old days how Palestine was, all nice and beautiful, unoccupied, un-raped… Our homeland turns into a story. In reality we can’t have it, we don’t have it. But it can turn into poems, into poetry, into literature, into stories.
So our homeland turns into a story. We love our homeland because of the story. …And we love the story because it’s about [class joins in] our homeland. And this connection is significant. Israel wants to sever this relationship between Palestinians and land, Palestinians and Jerusalem, and other places and cities. And literature attaches us back, connects us strongly to Palestine,…creating realities, making the impossible sound possible.”
When we look at the weapons the IDF wields, courtesy of imperialist powers like the United States, what are words? Why bother speak up? Alareer assures us that our words do matter. In the same lecture as above, he speaks of the Palestinian resistance poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), whom Israel arrested. Why, Alareer urges us to consider, would Israel feel so threatened by someone who wields no weapon but a pen?
“…We always fall into this trap of saying, ‘She [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!’ …So we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say, ‘She just wrote a poem!’ We shouldn’t be saying that.
Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that ‘the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were like facing 20 enemy fighters.’ … And the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back. She was put under house arrest, she was sent to prison for years.
And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry. …It took them years — over 50 years — of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money and everything else. But literature played one of the most crucial roles here. …Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was presented to the Jewish people around the world … [as] a land without a people to a people without a land. ‘Palestine flows with milk and honey. There’s no one there, so let’s go.’ … And there were people — there have always been people in Palestine. These are examples of how poetry can be a very significant part of life.”
Professor Refaat Alareer in a 2019 poetry lecture
It turns out that words are working — slowly but surely.
Since October 2023, the journalists and everyday people in Gaza who have been bravely broadcasting their stories to the world, and those across the world who have been spreading those stories, and organizing protests, and refusing to be silent in the face of government powers and heavy propaganda, are having an effect. Israel is concerned about its public image, which our collective words and actions are damaging.
So keep sharing Palestinians’ stories; keep writing; keep contacting your representatives; keep protesting.
We won’t stop till Palestine is free.
Binary-Breaking Worship 