Today’s post picks up where we left off, sharing the powerful and beautiful poetry of people’s varying resistances to annihilation. From the USA to Palestine, from Hawaii to Guatemala, these poems show us the common humanity we possess, though desperate efforts are being made to strip our commonalities away. These efforts are evident in trade and economics, militarism and war-mongering and the ongoing rush to extract resources and displace peoples in places deemed “hinterlands” by the metropoles of the present. They are evident on a social network of virtual interfaces where racist, Islamophobic, and misogynist memes and messages seem to abound.

We are one year (plus 76) into an active genocide and escalation of regional warfare the likes of which have never been seen before. The current literal weaponization of common technologies used by all, and terroristic attacks on civilians, children and women in Lebanon, the general populace– should be grounds for expulsion and ostracism from the world stage. Sanctions against Israel and its rabid parent, must be deployed to de-center and fragment the power of genocidal colonial and imperialist strategies and hegemons. But sadly the opposite is happening. If you are interested, you can have a listen here:

One of the most terrifying things has been to see colonial strategies of conquest and genocide that we have been part of over 500 years in the Americas, happening in the space of a year. The erasure and dismemberment of hundreds of thousands, the utter destruction of cultural and religious landmarks, shopping and recreational sites, health care, infrastructure sewage and sanitation gives us a sense of what historical moments must have been like in eras of physical conquest and occupation, in both settler and some extractive colonies. It’s like a time-lapse of annihilation. And so it remains ever more poignant and even necessary, to fight back with the art and writings of those who have other ways of envisioning the world in spite of our collective anomie.

Below I share poems written by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Adrienne Rich, exploring the depth and concerns of feminist poetry in our lifetimes.

MOUNTAIN, STONE
BY LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

Do not name your daughters Shaymaa,
courage will march them
into the bullet path of dictators.
 
Do not name them Sundus,
the garden of paradise calls out to its marigolds,
gathers its green leaves up in its embrace.
 
Do not name your children Malak or Raneem,
angels want the companionship of others like them,
their silvery wings trailing the filth of jail cells,
the trill of their laughter a call to prayer.
 
Do not name your sons Hamza.
Do not taunt the torturer’s whip
with promises of steadfastness.
 
Do not name your sons
Muhammad     Ahed     Zakaria     Ismail,
they will become seashells, disappear in the sand.
 
Do not name your children. Let them live
nameless, seal their eyelids
and sell their voices to the nightingale.
 
Do not name your children
and if you must
call them by what withstands
 
this endless season of decay.
Name them mountains,
call them stone.
 

What Kind of Times Are These
BY ADRIENNE RICH

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

SOMETHING MORE THAN FORCE
for you, who must feel the absence of this absence

Otto Rene Castillo, Guatemala

 I

It’s a sharp august dusk
and I say to you all,
now I am sadder than ever.
Perhaps nobody knows
as you do, my love,
now that I’m only
a long succession of cries
inside you.

Far away,
with blows they have broken my joy
in your body,
still they can’t understand my hands
that so suddenly ripped
the dark wind from your face.

 II

They don’t want
my rivers
to flow in you
They don’t like
your wings
to fly to me.

They want to ignore
the gesture of your lips
and they’ve put a dark cross
on the name you love
to repeat
over the planet.

But, love,
they cannot erase your heart
in the far away depths of your breast
as it beats my tenderness.

They can’t, love,
tear you from the heights
you live in my eyes.

They can’t my love,
rip you out of my life
because, like the sea,
I too keep something of your name
in me.

RESIST

BRANDY NĀLANI MCDOUGALL, Hawa’ii

Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum. Resist my people, resist them.
—Dareen Tatour



Hawaiians are still here. We are still creating, still resisting.
—Haunani-Kay Trask



Stand in rage as wind and current clash
                                       rile lightning and thunder
fire surge and boulder crash         

Let the ocean eat and scrape away these walls
Let the sand swallow their fences whole
                       Let the air between us split the atmosphere

We have no land             No country
             But we have these bodies              these stories
this language of rage                    left                 

This resistance is bitter
and tastes like medicine                 Our lands 
               replanted in the dark and warm             there
We unfurl our tangled roots                stretch
                             to blow salt across
             blurred borders of memory           

 They made themselves
 fences and bullets             checkpoints 
gates and guardposts                           martial law

They made themselves
            hotels and mansions         adverse 
possession             eminent domain and deeds
                   They made themselves 
                                                       shine 
                                           through the plunder

They say we can never— They say 
                           we will never—because 
            because they— 

and the hills and mountains have been 
mined for rock walls                    the reefs 
            pillaged for coral floors

They say we can never—
                           and the deserts and dunes have been
shoveled and taken for their houses and highways—

because we can never— because 
the forests have been raided                      razed 
and scorched and we                                 we the wards

refugees          houseless          present-
absentees       recognition refusers        exiled
uncivilized       disposable        natives

protester-activist-terrorist-resisters—
               our springs and streams have been
 dammed—so they say we can never return
                       let it go accept this 
progress         stop living
            in the past—

but we make ourselves
         strong enough to carry all of our dead
                engrave their names in the clouds
We gather to sing whole villages awake 
        We crouch down to eat rocks like fruit
                 to hold the dirt the sand in our hands 
to fling words 
           the way fat drops of rain 
                   splatter off tarp or corrugated roofs
We remember the sweetness                We rise from the plunder
           They say there is no return                             
                   they never could really make us leave