Two Palestinian Poets

This is how 2024 begins. I have not touched the saturation. All I did is "Denoise" and crop. This is what I saw. Not a great omen for the year, I fear. This is the view from my bedroom window at dawn on the day of the funeral I will not attend, funeral of a friend’s grandson who shot himself. 

It is a day of fragments and shards. I start things and don't finish. Forget what I started and start another thing. Leave strings untied. Play the music for half a song. Feel absent from myself. But I can still read.

Here are two poems by Palestinians. A man. A woman. Like you. Like me. The difference is they found the words, the English words, to tell this.

1. “Portrait of My Nose”
by Mohammed El-Kurd (in Rifqa, copyright 2021Mohammed El-Kurd)

     Arrogant with height.
One nose away from clouds.

I have my grandmother’s
and in the knot, tangled
a homesickness
for people generous with 
     nose.

My grandmother’s is beautiful; mine is
one nose away from beauty,
one       away from Anglo-Saxon.

I have my grandmother’s
and my grandmother had pride
favored functionality
she was never a
     nose away from anything
     but jasmines.


2. “Malice”
by Hala Alyan (in ATRIUM, copyright 2012 Hala Alyan)

At any given moment,
there is a beautiful

girl in a city
or desert

shrugging a lackluster
dress down her thin back, bare-

legged beneath the damask
as she picks her

teeth with the
lemongrass of your name.