Rise
After Tawfiq Ziad
From Nazareth: this light
in my eyes,
this flame in my blood,
and all the pain
of Palestine
I speak and gladly give –
I, the orphan
starving, who heard
the guns invade, the boots
ring out,
the prison walls resound.
For at my back
my people sing, like a dove
raised high on woken winds,
or this flag
of love and history
our voices carry,
which soon will shake
the mountains, like
the olive tree in leaf.
***
Postcards from Palestine
The tidy wars you planned
above my body’s shrinking map,
the scars your bullet-mind unlatched,
and hatched, and loosed across my land,
the stench of metal on your boots,
the brutal compass in your hands,
(my south of buried villages,
my east of risen moons) –
they all go into it, shards
of the voice, or lines in the air,
into the remnant which you fear,
my torturer, will escape from here
to rectify the echoes, redirect the breeze…
that ghost, that almost emptiness,
in which your symphonies of dread
have dared me to believe.
~
We know our land
when the soldiers send us
to the border camps,
and press our mouths
into the ground.
We knew our home
when the fugue of drones
began to float,
rising, falling,
above the roof.
We’ll know our names
from the numbers
they assign to us,
our every death apportioned
by a decimal of grief.
~
Not the body only,
but my poetry
and dreams they killed –
the presidents and generals,
the governments
of nations,
the scientists
and educators
standing to attention,
the nimble-
minded bureaucrats
whose fingers typed extinction.
I mark them all
as profiteers
of massacre and rubble.
And to the others,
opening clear windows
to tomorrow’s sun, I say:
look for me
among the vanished faces
of my people.
~
Remember my words,
as if they were warmed by the blood in my wrist,
as if they were cut from the coil of my tongue.
Remember my song,
as if it contained the bricks of my city,
or rang with the sound of the sea on the rocks,
as if it resisted a world without pity,
or was wrung from the breath of my life’s skeleton.
Remember the sun
that lent me a shadow to plant in the ground,
that gave me the right to delight in the clouds,
that watched as I fell at the flash of the bombs,
that burns on the flesh of the bone-brittle homes.
Remember my poems,
as if in accusation of the architects of pain
when seeking for the future that the olive branch proclaims.
– Ciarán O’Rourke is a poet, based in Galway, Ireland. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was issued by Irish Pages Press in 2018 and highly commended by the Forward Foundation the following year. His miscellany of essays, One Big Union, was published in 2021, and his second poetry collection is forthcoming. More information about his work can be found at www.ragpickerpoetry.net/books. He contributed these poems to The Palestine Chronicle.
