Watching the invisibilizing collusion of mass media and the Israeli state vis a vis the media blockade on Gaza shows us not only the weaponizing of the internet but of everything necessary for the maintenance of life. Add to that, the genocidal bombing under the cover of absent eyes.

Peoples around the globe have called on human decency and a ceasefire in a battle that is a symbol of inequality on many levels. Indeed we are watching and even the disappearance of 2. 3 million peoples’ presence our planet Earth, and on the tangled web of world-wide communications, cannot bring our leaders to place human lives before profit.

I leave you the voices of those we are not being allowed to hear, the voices of poets, who, through their capture of small and epic moments of Palestinian experience, give us a glimpse that another world is possible. I think, that ever since he penned the words, ” The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”, Antonio Gramsci has described our very conjuncture with it’s regional and ethnicized inequalities and inhumanity, it’s climate destruction for profit, settler genocides against indigenous peoples, nuclear stakes, and cheapening of human life at it’s very core– empathy and solidarity. In hiding behind gods of profit and relentless power, the world’s political and corporate leaders have forgotten how to be human. And that indeed is the time of monsters.

A Palestinian Might Say
BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

What?
You don’t feel at home in your country,
almost overnight?
All the simple things
you cared about,
maybe took for granted. . .
you feel
insulted, invisible?
Almost as if you’re not there?
But you’re there.
Where before you mingled freely. . .
appreciated people who weren’t
just like you. . .
divisions grow stronger.
That’s what “chosen” and “unchosen” will do.
(Just keep your eyes on your houses and gardens.
Keep your eyes on that tree in bloom.)
Yes, a wall. Ours came later but. . .
who talks about how sad the land looks,
marked by a massive wall?
That’s not a normal shadow.
It’s something else looming over your lives.
 
Naomi  Shihab Nye, “A Palestinian Might Say” from The Tiny Journalist.  Copyright © 2019 by Naomi  Shihab Nye. 

IV. Untitled

He was crying, so I took his hand to steady him and to wipe away his tears.

I told him as sorrow choked me: I promise you that justice

will prevail in the end, and that peace will come soon.

I was lying to him, of course. I know that justice won’t prevail

and peace won’t come soon, but I had to stop his tears.

I had this false notion that says, if we can, by some sleight of hand, stop

the river of tears, everything would proceed in a reasonable manner.

Then, things would be accepted as they are. Cruelty and justice would graze

together in the field, god would be satan’s brother, and the victim would be

his killer’s beloved.

But there is no way to stop the tears. They constantly pour out like a flood

and ruin the lying ceremony of peace.

And for this, for tears’ bitter obstinance, let the eye be consecrated as the truest saint

on the face of the earth.

It is not poetry’s job to wipe away tears.

Poetry should dig a trench where they can overflow and drown the universe.

                                     —from A Date for a Crow

I.

I caught a glimpse of you as I ran. I had no time to stop and kiss your hand. The world was chasing me down like I was a thief and it was impossible for me to stop. If I had stopped I’d have been killed. But I caught a glimpse of you: your hand a stem of narcissus in a glass of water, your mouth unbuttoned, and your hair a soaring bird of prey. I caught a glimpse of you but I had no matches with me to light a bonfire and dance around it. The world was failing me, abandoning me, so I didn’t even wave at you.

One day the world will settle down, the crazed cable channels will stop broadcasting, and those that hound me will disperse so I can return to that road, the one where I caught a glimpse of you. I’ll find you in that same chair: your hand a stem of narcissus, your smile a bird of prey, and your heart an apricot blossom. And there, with you, beneath the shade of your apricot, I’ll tear down the tent of my orphanhood and build my home.

—from Kushtban

“Zakaria Mohammed is a Palestinian poet, journalist, editor, and researcher specializing in the history of the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The Crow’s Date (forthcoming). His work has been translated into English and Korean. He is from Nablus.”