April 2024

T.S. Eliot wrote in his Wateland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.”

Life seems unreal. 6 months of live-streamed genocide. What is sanity anymore?

poems:

• A House That Looks Like Your Laughter by Nasser Rabah, a Gazan poet and writer.
• Ibrahim Abu Sitta, a Palestinian-Canadian visual artist documenting what it’s like to be a Gazan, a Palestinian in exile during these times. You can also check his website and contact him here.
• When the bombing stops (please God make it stop), is this what the eerie silence will feel at a coast in Gaza? Absence is a poem by the Greek poet and rebel Yannis Ritsos. And this is another poem by him: The Meaning of Simplicity.
• Hamza was just an ordinary man…. a poem by the daughter of Nablus- Fadwa Touqan.
• I recently discovered Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poems. Here is a poem called Fatal Music (you can read it for free- you only have to create an account). I love this line:
  • “I love most that object which evokes another. How the split fig on my tongue leaks honey, the gummy resin of eternal rivers.”

• On the 48th year on Land Day, Mahmoud Darwish sings:

To our land,

and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns,

the map of absence.

What does poetry mean if you it doesn’t denounce a genocide?

What good is your poetry if you can’t denounce a genocide?

my favorite[ya no] poetry professor sends me an email about the semantics of geno-cide, and whether the ongoing slaughter of my people in Gaza qualifies as a genocide or no. She talks about her fear of annhiliation because of terror organiztions across the regions, and as I read her email, my pain soon dissolved into anger: can poets be this dilusional? isn’t poetry the anti-thesis of bad faith? it seems not. What’s better: pain or anger? I don’t know. All I know is that I have huge amount of anger and it no longer consumes me like before, but i consume it: my anger is my fuel on my mission to open the eyes of every so-called poet defending a geno-cide; a mission to defend poetry against bad faith and privileged colonizers.