Fady Joudah

To palm trees, zaatar, basil and tomatoes that weapons poisoned.

To palm trees, the natural reserve for the phoenix ashes.

To olive oil, preserver of time.

To natural gas reserves, may you be a stake through the heart of vampires.

To flower,

bread and bakeries, to those who did not fulfill American media's requests to boil the ocean, those who couldn't celebrate their birthdays with cake and candles during the massacre, to the martyrs who did not furnish their photos for their killers to air them on their compassionate TV, to the martyrs who did not speak English,

to the relatable and unrelatable, the translatable and untranslatable Palestinian flesh, to those who recite the verse of return, to those whose minds have shattered into shrapnel nothing can remove from their souls, to those with dementia,

May it save you from the full scale of terror.

To forgetfulness, win a mercy.

To remembrance, win a mercy.

To crutches and wheelchairs.

To those who composed songs and sang them to the syncopated thuds of annihilation.

To life, to light, the light is dead, long live the light.

To those who prayed in the pitch black night to the power of God, the only power available to them, but could not meditate on moon and stars.

To those who found a way to fall in love.

Make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars to those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war.

Have your pigeons come home to those, to those, to those we are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.

It's hard to speak after reading it.

Mm-hmm.

I think those of us who actually care to follow the news and understand that this is almost like you can say that it's an archival poem, but there has to be a form in which the unspeakable is both specific and universal.