Salam to Gaza
Hussein Barghouthi
Translated from the Arabic by Suneela Mubayi
My sister will live without me
My family will live without me
Part of me will live without me
The whole of me will live without me.
Salam to those holding out in prison
my heart goes out to those who died inside
A sparrow’s peck to those who remain,
Peace be upon a stone, blue like ocean waves
Like the sky, like mountain goats’ eyes,
like flights of pigeons, peace be upon that stone,
peace be upon it, upon it
upon it, right now
are the dreams of a land, hopes of a nation
Peace be upon a stone encircled by flowers
That girls’ eyes reach out to embrace

Salam to Gaza
The refugee camp lacks bread now
But it is enriched with blood
The camp lacks land and bread
But now it ascends to the skies
Salam to Gaza’s doves
Where they flutter they brush at my heart
And drink of my water
To honour those who remain
Silence outdoes words

Salam to a pair of eyelashes on a boy’s face
Rafah eyelashes wet with roses and tears
Salam to those offering their bodies to coffin-bearers
And a sparrow’s peck to those who remain
What can I offer to the cemetery
The road into it
Is the very road we take to depart it like gods
The massacring hand cannot overpower
the torrents of life
The streets, like the sparrows, stand still
They drink from rain whose free drops come from clouds
    floating free in a free sky
Salam to these trees
Their cry rings louder than my song
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Color photograph of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha
"Poetry That is Filled With the Crushing Weight of Gaza's Rubble"

"Written in the past year, if [Mosab Abu Toha's] essays bear witness to what he lost in Gaza, his poetry is filled with the crushing weight of the rubble. Hard-hitting, deeply felt, his poems are impossible to walk away from and should be essential reading. His neat sentences contain the bloodiness of the war and barely hold the crushing weight of grief. 'She slept on her bed, never woke up again,' he writes in ‘Under the Rubble’. 'Her bed has become her grave, a tomb beneath the ceiling of her room, the ceiling a cenotaph. No name, no year or birth, no year of death, no epitaph.'"

via THE TRIBUNE
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Color cover image of Chloe Garcia Roberts' book, Fire Eater
What Sparks Poetry:
Chloe Garcia Roberts on Language as Form


"I’ve always enjoyed the thought of writing as a force that could effect the inversion of that arrow, the timeline, with its incessant forward hurl. For this piece though, I wanted to attempt to use my subjective experience as a basis for objective conclusions. I dreamt about writing poems that were lightly disguised as a proofs. 'Temporal Saturation' is the first poem in Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, and it is the template that I used for writing the rest of the book. The first part of the poem is analytic and the second lyric but neither section can exist without each other, they are one."
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