- I ask rivers how to write
stitches of doctors, yarns of weavers?
How to write like needles?
How to write tenderly like
a father’s caress
on his sons’ graves?
How to write a child’s sleep, a mother’s lullaby?
How to write rhythms
into a heart losing beats? How to write repetitions?
How to write with feet and fists?
How to write by bodies
and to unweave barbwires?
How to write in different inks, like rain, like blood, like floods?
How to write on a horizon line?
Who writes? Who writes,
just nearby?
Who strikes?
Who writes silence?
Who writes silhouettes?
Who writes sand into deserts
and salt into the sea?
“The poison-tipped questions were shot at you: What will you write without exile?”
Darwish answered, “I will write better.”
We don’t need blood to paint lilies and shades of roses—
roses and lilies drinking from earth color themselves.
Baldwin said: “Write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
He didn’t mean we needed bones to pile up poems.
The distance between never again and again again,
red paint and blood, vandalism and two-thousand-pound bombs.
The distance from newspapers to reporters,
from bullets to bodies,
between gravestones,
a body and a head, a leg and a hand.
The distance from a paper’s skin
to what’s etched on it,
from epigraphs to epitaphs—
these gaps
these valleys.
Rivers write better than me.
Kelps and fishes. They, too, write better than me—
their wavy gestures weave into rivers’ courses.
I ask rivers how to write.
Rivers rise.
We don’t need more angels.
I want people to rest on sofas
in their living rooms—
more and more living room.
There are keys for houses in memory,
and rooms saved for those who return from earth,
let there be ajar doors.
Let nights ooze a soft sigh.
Let days dye faded petals.
Let birds have a full breakfast.
Give me a piece of paper like a bandage. Give me a bundle.
Give me a stone, I will throw it over the fences, let it be a meteor.
Give me a soft earth for our soft rain,
let there be pores for poppies and thirsty footsteps.
Give me scenes to sprout, lead me into your garden,
I float among blooming lilies and roses
listening to your flute.
Give me a line break,
let me pick up a stone,
and teach me
how to write
better like a stone.
Dedicated to Palestinians who teach me how to live and write and oppressed people worldwide who are writing resistance and freedom.
The line “Who writes? Who writes / just nearby?” refers to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “speaking nearby.” In her film Reassemblage (1982), Trinh says, “I do not intend to speak about / just speak near by.”
In In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “The poison-tipped questions were shot at you: What will you write without exile? What will you write without occupation? Exile is existence. The existing occupation is what hinders the efficacy of the imagination. I will write better.” Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon.
In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, James Baldwin said, “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”
“Living room” is borrowed from June Jordan’s poem “Moving Toward Home,” where she wrote these lines for example, “because I need to speak about home / I need to speak about living room,” and “I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room / and where are my loved ones?”
