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GEORGE ABRAHAM: Birthright

December 20, 2017 Hawaiʻi Review
IMGP1097.JPG

Birthright

there is a voice behind

each morning prayer that

wakes Jerusalem before the

rooster’s shrill cry -

 

and before

it was a boisterous thing,

it was small; tiny itch

nestled between vocal chords,

brief settler - barely a home

at all -

 

much like the heart

whose swelling cries & floods

& tears membranes with its

wanting & maybe wanting

is its own home -

 

   not the holy

vessel who begs its own rupture;

makes Jericho of its vast

chambers, tense with longing -

intersection of rivulet & fallow

empty - biological, in its

contradiction -

 

i mean to say:

the body is holy

war enough for these

nations, swelling.

Brooding.

 

***

 

& here i am - halfway across the world

from everything i know, and yet i find it easiest

to fall in love with an unfamiliar land; this

architecture of olive grove; diaspora of gravel

& stone migration - aftermath of the colonizers’

explosions, land giving itself to the wind -

the most forgiving god of faithless scatter,

 

& for once, i begin to understand the way

my grandfather holds his olive-wood prayer beads

like something holy, in their invisibility; the way

Teta makes nostalgia of Her Jerusalem before

the settlers & their talk of walls made apartheid

of our God

& perhaps this is too

familiar, and my longing is just the weight of my

ancestors’ grief carrying me home, or here & isn’t

that all we ever wanted: a place to die

whole, not holy, not martyr; somewhere

my every breath doesn’t have to be a revolution;

somewhere stone can be a home’s foundation & not

war crime; somewhere the sea doesn’t gentrify us, or

swallow our limbs; somewhere it holds & carries

the weight of us          back Home –


George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian-American Poet, Activist, and Engineering PhD Candidate at Harvard University. His chapbook, al youm: for yesterday & her inherited traumas, was a winner of the Atlas Review’s 2016 chapbook contest. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl, Apogee, Thrush, Kweli, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine, and anthologies such as Bettering American Poetry 2016, Nepantla, and the Ghassan Kanafani Palestinian Literature Anthology.

In Poetry, HR 87
← SYDNEE WAGNER: Two PoemsHOSSEIN RAHMANI: The Shepherd →

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