So Now What?
(for Charles Bukowski)
During war,
milk is the colour of blood, honey
the colour of bone
The skulls here are bored
They want a new life, not this tragedy
I’m listing all your war crimes
I remember being happy
But I don’t want to remember
I don’t want to remember the man
I remember bombs and Gaza instead
Amputated limbs like branches
Here, everything tastes like seawater
I hope I’ll wake up from this dream soon
And that the man will return to me
in the morning and to numb the pain
I take the pills one by one
and a fog descends upon me
I wish you had decided to stay
so that we could make things work
but you never did and the truth is
I must accept that as fact and choose to live
For some time I breathed easier
in this world because of you
Because you had become all my reasons
I have questions and they trouble me
Do I still live inside your heart and
inside your life as a passing thought?
I write a letter to God and put it inside a poem.
At night I pray for Israel too, because in war nobody wins.
I pray for soldiers on both sides.
That their blood will turn into flowers.
—–
Where are all the wildflowers? What happened to the books?
You walk like the trees, you will
always walk like the trees from the
river to the sea, Palestine. I offer
you gifts. Oranges, tea, flowers, life.
You do not beg, you do not steal,
you do not say anything at all when
they say they have to amputate
I listen to two poems by Ali Sobh
I make spaghetti and watch the fine
sticks that I can so easily snap into
two with my fingers turn into noodles
Noodles not dead bodies. Not heads
I have something to eat and I’m grateful
for that but Palestine is hungry. How
she longs for the sweetness of milk, the
kindness of honey, the protein that
chicken provides. By now, the river
has turned to blood and the children into
angels and the mosques and hospitals
into dust. I cry me a river. My eyes are red.
My tears, the memory of blood.
I know what it feels like to be broken,
heart shattered, body in pieces
So do you, Palestine. So do you.
—–
Lux
The skin, thunder, her skin is perfect. It is milk, it is
pale, it is privileged. I talk about this in
romantic undertones. I write a novella about
it. I mask my envy, live in my house, and live. My skin is the colour of a green sea. It is
orange peel and stretchmarks. It is a tapestry. Stars are to
be found there, the universe, a tribe of singing
angels. No woman
is proud of cellulite, of the scarring on her
heart that she has carried into middle-age.
She bathes in light and this privilege I want
so badly. This author bathes with bath salts and Pears
soap, lavender Vinolia bath oil. Fenjal is on the
bathroom windowsill. The blood washes over me.
I taste blood in my mouth. The bullet. I can’t
get the stain out. I turn the bullet into a rose.
It’s futile. You can’t turn bullets into roses.
My mute paternal grandfather taught me that.
I expose Palestine’s smoke to the light. The light turns the air strikes on Gaza into a pilot.
The bombs are sent to a storage holder on the moon.
The war is abandoned and peace reigns but
then I wake up and I realise I was dreaming
and that today was Palestine’s funeral.
—–
Nusayba Alareer
You were a witness to a heinous
atrocity of war, a crime against humanity
Wildflowers in open spaces
Wildflowers in closed spaces,
in spaces that have been tampered with
You lost a husband, your children
lost a father, the world lost a poet
I sit in my room and write this poem
I, too, am a witness of crimes against
humanity
You, Palestine, come to me in a dream
You, Gaza, come to me in a dream
You, Rafah, come to me in a dream
You, every slain poet, every dead child,
every monster in war, in life
You every martyr, come to me
You, Refaat Alareer, come to me in a dream
You, Omar Abu Shaweesh, come to me in a dream
You, Yousef Dawas, come to me in a dream
You all come to me
like Hemingway or church
like bananafish
like Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger
John Updike
M. Night Shyamalan’s
over productive imagination
Before I wake up completely
I find that I am losing my voice
That another Palestinian child
is dead, (the body found in a
ditch), that there are more martyrs
today than there were yesterday
Where are all the poets and writers
Ask Refaat Alareer, he knows
Ask, Omar Abu Shaweesh, he knows
Ask, Yousef Dawas, he knows
How painful it is to die young
Even more painful to live with no hope,
to live with no bread, to chase
famine, to survive on dust that’s
to be found in a refugee camp.
—–
Poems © Abigail George
Image: Dall-E AI remixed