QUESTIONS INSPIRED BY REFAAT ALAMEER

for Rafaat Alameer targeted and murdered by an IDF airstrike,
thanking him for the questions he leads us to seek answers to

” if I must die
let there be hope “
Refaat Alameer

physics studies the refraction
of light
in water
but do we experience the refraction
of hope
in the dark ?

can i make this poem
filter revolutionary love
out of mourning

can a painter
break down the color black
into iridescence ?

can a sculptor
mold a self-filling bowl
that will catch the sunbeams
as well as the shadows ?

is there a weaver
who can thread
joy
through grief ?

can sparkling specks of sun
be blown
into glass ?

can an ancestral kite
run
a lost child ?

Refaat Alameer’s legacy
gives
a luminous reply

NO ANSWERS HERE

‘This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric
is not as valuable as the polemic. That the sonnet must give way
to the photocopied and wheat pasted list of companies and individuals
with financial ties to the genocide”

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Palestinian author

this is not the time
for ready-made answers
but the hour of unmuzzled questions

the genocide
ripping hourly
through the land of Palestine
tears apart the manufactured quizzes
of corporate narratives –
only the questions of the children,
unmutable gentle stones,
remain

from so far away
a child
unused to the lull of silence
says to us
bemused :
right now there are no sounds of planes,
can you hear ?

will our toys still be alive ?
asks the small son of a poet

a shrapnel-blinded child
asks the doctor
am I still alive
or is this the voice of heaven ?

there is no medicine
there are no words
no answers
except
a new language
of story-telling, yes –
but also of story-acting
these children will understand
if they survive

Thanks to Gazan poet, Mosab Abu Toha, for the words of Yazzan, his 8 year old son and to paediatrician Tanya Haj-Hassan for bearing witness to the state in which children arrive in intensive care in Gaza.

WHAT THE RUBBLE YIELDS

rubble
everywhere
the color of despair
as far as the eye can see

here
children build gray dirt castles
far from the beach
they cannot reach

there
other children go on a treasure hunt
with happy cries
in their collapsed home
to dig for their toys,
some clothes
and
a teddy bear
the worse for bombing wear

elsewhere
in a daily labor of love
a man crazed with grief
goes back every day
to his bombed house
to dig for his wife
and today
after a month
he has found
her scarf

everywhere
young and old
have lost the layout of their rooms
and beloved remembered spaces
become a labyrinth
that traps them
even in their sleep

just now
out of a ruin
where there were thought to be
no survivors,
a baby
was found –
it is quickly swaddled,
it moves
and its lips are not blue
and it smiles

LAMENT FOR A PALESTINIAN GRAVEDIGGER

For Sadi Barka

silence except for the bombs
no prayers
no processions in the cemetery
no relatives
just one old gravedigger
his hair as white as the phosphorus they send

Sadi Barka
cries
for those who are not there to mourn
cries
because he has to dig mass graves alone
cries
because the women and children
he mostly buries
have done nothing wrong
cries
because today
he must fit forty five souls
in six square feet
cries
because in the land
where graveyards are running out of space
there is no welcome
for the ancestors’
cries
because there is no one to heed

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

QUESTIONS INSPIRED BY REFAAT ALAMEER | NO ANSWERS HERE | WHAT THE RUBBLE YIELDS | LAMENT FOR A PALESTINIAN GRAVEDIGGER