Bedouin
Eyes
My
hands turn to claws, tear
newspapers
declare war
the
West erupts against
those
backward Arabs
my
throat bubbles, chokes with acid hate
rage
and salt water form cesspools
in
my Bedouin eyes and blind me
my
breathing shallow
mind
numb and calculated
the
gardenia scent of my country
has
never seemed farther away
I
see your guns aimed
in
the name of justice;
tearing
flesh, stopping a breath
in
mid-exhale, a heart
in
the second half of its beat
when
you scream terrorists
I
hear the prayer of my family
a
tight canopy against the falling sky
while
you count mortalities, I see faces
that
look like mine
now
my lips will not form the words of Allah
as
I feel our city shudder, then
break
and collapse onto itself
my
lungs save their wind for curses
as
my people, bruised, cannot rise
and
I welcome
the
nausea which overtakes
weakens
forces my body to sink to the floor
Jenin
When
will we learn
A
massacre is a massacre
Is
Sabra and Shatila
Is
Jenin
When
will we remember
Freshly
turned earth welcomes
A
broken body as willingly as a seed
Harboring
both as night falls
When
will we turn away
From
another mother's grief
Avert
our eyes as she stumbles,
Body
bowing over a dark patch of earth
When
will we erase intifada
from our vocabulary
Watch
a soldier don a helmet, flak jacket, M-16
Before
bulldozing another orange tree
When
will learn to ignore the sound of wood
Cracking
as it splits
Down
to 40 year old roots
When
will we understand
A
house carefully constructed easily gives way
To
hardened steel
To
a power greater than its own
When
will we give up
On
UN investigations and war crime tribunals
No
one watches our small piece of land
No
cameras access our daily dose
Of
death and destruction
When
will we fade away
Another
people erased, just another
Cherokee,
Apache, Navajo
History
rewritten without our name
When
will we learn
A
massacre is a massacre
Is
Sabra and Shatila
Is
Jenin
Is
forgotten
ghaflah
- the sin of forgetfulness
born
by the mediterranean
our
mothers bathe us in orange-blossom water
olive
trees and cedars
strain
to give us shade
we
come to america where they call our land
the
East meaning
different/dark/dirty
we
soon forget
our
grandmothers combed hair like ours
we
wish our hair blonde
our eyes and skin light
we
know barbie
looks
better than scheherezade
we
think french makes us sophisticated so
we
greet each other bonjour instead of salaam
proud
of our colonizer's tongue
we
forget the Qur'an sings in arabic
when
we arrived
our
fingernails pierced the palms of our hands
we
stared at pictures of our children
eye
sockets carved out by rubber bullets
on
the 10 o'clock news
our
brothers and sisters spit up blood and teeth
and
CBS declared them "terrorists"
now
we turn away from bruises and broken bones
body
counts and funerals
we
know we cannot help
anyway
we
forget we once stood on the same ground
they
die on
we
look for the arabia packaged by the west
we
escape into clubs to watch
blonde
bellydancers named jasmine
sashay
almost naked
we
eat pasty hummous at eight dollars a plate
and
tell each other
how
much we miss our home
Originally
published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 1998
and The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology,
edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink, 2001).