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.