When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America

And here I am
a woman alone
at the threshold of a cold season	 
              —  Forough Farrokhzad, "Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season,"
                   translated by Elizabeth T. Gray

Let us believe in the impermanence of countries.
Let us believe in the bulldozing of walls.
Let us invert the starlit vectors of a name.
Let us unname, unarchive, unarchaeologize the origin.
Let us sing the singularities of our being.
Let us reflect not, singe rot, knot air & break plot.
Let us believe in the miracles of the lyric: the flowers unspringtimed, the snowfalls unsilenced — 
Let us believe in the splitting of bread unbodied, the quenching of wine unblooded — 
Let us discover the beginning of language in the breaking of seasons
	        & hallowed be thy hollowed be thy.
Let us believe in the living of fathers in winter, the returning of mothers in winter.
Let us believe in our people, who walked on impossible waters.
Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season, yes, & let us believe	
	        in the hearth of an impossible fall.
Let our belief in question, case & metaphor return us, in faith, to the land —
 	        return our songs to the land, return our bodies to the land, return our land to the land.
Let this break our hearts, unrafted. 	        Let this save our arts, uncrafted.


	        There is a hunger within hunger, a winter within winter.	 —  Suheir Hammad, “Gaza”

& on the day of the so-called “ceasefire,” when they kidnapped the Gazan
poet, where were you? Or had you already crowned him
into martyr? You who only know how to love an artist
by mummifying them — when the Arabs love our poets,
we turn them into music! When the Arab Apocalypse comes to America,
its music will be one of phone calls across borders, wondering if
this is how our ancestors felt the day they stole Kanafani from us.
I cry every time I see a kite with Refaat’s words — that poetry can become
a study in better names than monument. How much of us has died
in the assumption that greatness is the sun a poem arcs toward?
A line ending can be a kind of illiteracy. If it can happen in LANGUAGE
it can happen in BODY! If it can happen in MYTH it was already
a kind of HISTORY! We tell this to ourselves as we mourn a man
we’ve only known through poems, that the impossible distance is screened — that exile
is just the state of loving the ones we haven’t met, as we live
the lives we could never live while grieving those same lives.



	        Why am I on earth with these people?  —  Dionne Brand, “Nomenclature for the Time Being”

O poets of this Useless, Useless nation. Where were you?
Have you shared whatever Darwish you’ve found digestible today?
Can you love us beyond our capacity to translate?
What’s the view like from your yacht? From our sea?
How coppered are the canyons of MADE IN THE USA? How does it feel
to taste the ash of Darwish’s corpse on your charred dinner plates?
GET MY PRETTY NAME OUT OF YOUR MOUTH I sang to the illiterates of PEN: is
it you who pledge allegiance to a flag sewn of our children’s corpses?
When has the Atlantic been anything but a war crime?
Have we named the weeds that water themselves in our blood
money while budding in the millions extracted from Indigenous writers or
the Poet Laureate saying Hello My Name Is US Government? We’re waiting for Joy
to apologize to us, as if we haven’t we witnessed the CIA’s ghost
buying out the literary conference booth blocks like real estate
THE APOCALYPSE OF PALESTINE IS AN APOCALYPSE OF LETTERS, I
PROMISE! I’m still not over University of Chicago Press charging us hundreds
for permission to republish their one (abandoned) Palestinian, call it a HOSTAGE
NARRATIVE! When the Nice White Lady rejected me, she spelled out
“Sigh,” no metaphor! When every day is wound-a-day, academy of
american silences . . . Can we pluck these weeds like stubborn hairs?
Has the wolf pack gone silent?