Poetry

The nature of something
Promised to you
Is: it's given to you as a gift
It's reserved for you
Well-preserved for you
That its transfer to you may be swift

And the giver ensures
That the gift they are giving
Is pure and pristine and intact
Untainted by blood
Or the cries of the living
To whom it was given in fact

I guess what I'm trying to say with these words is:

Rockets and bullets and gases and booms
Of phosphorous white that melts aways skins
And bulldozing babies inside sacred wombs
And gunning down kids seeking shelter in bins

Are proof that the gift you are killing to get
Was promised to humans more worthy than you

For me
 Everything is for me
  Nothing is for him or her
   Or them
    It’s all for me
     The sunrise
      The sunset
       The rain
        The drained cup
         The laughter
          The anger
           The tears
            The cuss words
             The breath of a baby warming her father’s neck
              The cold
               The heat
                The accident that occurred on my street
                 Or the seven car pile-up three seas away
                  If I know of it
                 It is for me
                And me alone
               So when a video makes its rounds
              Plinking into my notifications
             Showing a Palestinian man
            Make his ablution in the freshly fallen water
           Welled into the worn canvas top of his tent
          That is for me
         For me to see
        And see again
       For me to ponder
      For me to feel the salty waves
     Of helplessness wash over me
    Then recede
   Like the shadow of the ‘asr prayer
  He chased
 And reached
For me

They keep telling us it started on October 7th
But a quick search on google reveals
It started later
Exactly 53 days later
On November 29th
1947

That’s when the UN
General Assembly adopted Resolution 181
The Partition Resolution
You see, they had tried something like this out
A few month earlier
In British India’s hell
And found that it all went
Swimmingly well

So nothing haphazard here as Iqbal noted
There’s more to it than oranges, honey and dates
(We’re back to dates)
It’s men who think they’re carving out fates
With fire and shrapnel of considerable mass
Oblivious to the reckoning awaiting them
At the hands of very particular angels
When that cosmic inversion comes to pass

Then all will see:
What is, is not
What is not, is

Palestinian courage is a gift
A gift from God for the world to see

A slice from the ummah of the last Nabi
To show us how strong OUR faith could be
Had he led us to the Red Sea

Salaam upon Musa and the moments he
Sought refuge from the ignorant patiently

So watch them laugh
Watch them cry
Watch them live
Watch them die
Watch them very very closely

And like any other gift
We had better believe it
Is best to feel unworthy
As we receive it

In the end it’s all a testament to their Nabi
Our Nabi
SallAllahu ‘alayhi wa Sallam

Who has the time to make up lies

Day after day
Of having your space invaded
Your homes barged into by strangers with guns
The best of them leaving you alive after
They’re done
With their operation, the laughter
Mocking your indignities
As if each indignity weren’t mockery enough

Day after day
Rifles shoved in your face
That’s a good day
The smell of spent cartridges mixes poorly with insults
Shoot to cripple!
Checkpoints like gates to hell
From hell to hell
But if you dive, you gain the memory of hitting asphalt
As you bleed to death

Day after day
Of crying at funerals
That often become cause for more funerals
For some dead may not be mourned, they say
Someone said there’s no PTSD beacuse the trauma has no post
No post left standing to lean on
And then when the infection climaxes in a festering boil
It bursts and the pus flows
And that pathetic inflammatory response
Begets a brand of cowardice only the coward knows

So, who has the time to make up lies
When they can barely stay alive