[...] by Fady Joudah
31 Days of Poetry: Day Ten. I only wish this collection had no reason to exist.
This morning over 100 displaced people - men, women and children- were killed by Israeli strikes on al-Tabin school in Gaza as they gathered for the Fajr (dawn) prayer. These people who have suffered months and years of aggression and incomprehensible loss were targeted even as they awoke in the early hours to call upon their Lord.
What does it really mean- what does it do to you- to have to gather the pieces of people? To place beloved friends, family, community in plastic bags? To hear the screams of those trapped with no means of rescuing them? To live this reality every day for months on end (on top of all the years before it)? No words will ever be enough.
Today’s offering is ‘[…]’ by Palestinian-American poet and physician, Fady Joudah, which was published in his 2024 collection, ‘[…]: Poems’ (Outspoken Press).
[...]
Daily you wake up to the killing of your people, their tongue
accented in your mother's milk.
Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you?
Censored, the news. Shadow banned. McCartheyed.
I wake up to what I go to bed with. Without dreams. Nightmares
are my days into weeks into months. Will you stand with
me next year or the next? I will be then as my people now.
Wandering the carnage you authorised or protested.
I am removing me from the we of you. Sick leave. Unpaid.
Administrative. Long hiatus. I have watched vultures before.
Their committees over carcasses they did not kill. Daily the
vultures are mute.
Daily my father waits for the rip in his soul to widen. The last
of his siblings alive, he dreads mourning a niece, a nephew,
their kids, or grandkids.
Daily I remain where they remain. My mother's two oldest
sisters used to set aside pocket money for her schooling: during
previous wars on their to exist.
My life, the accent of their accent when my mind goes. Daily,
my English is less identifiable to you. I search for a mole on a
cheek, on the corner of a lip, a holy stone, a blackness to kiss.
And my shards, collectible, then a collector's piece. The dead
are here to teach us what? What do the slain teach? And grief
sings being because the dead don't grieve or sing. Not without
the living, they don't.
Daily, this pre-ancestral memory, impossible to walk away
from, to stay with. It keeps saying that all our names are false.
Daily, your nuance. Your attention to detail, drop by drop.
Another round of sedatives. Sedative: the capital. Body: the
sweat shop.I share this collection while wishing, so desperately, that it never had to be written.
See you on day eleven,
Tasnim
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