THEY WOULD BOMB AT THE SPEED OF THOUGHT
“Time is long”
W.E.B. DuBois
“Against the loveless world”
Susan Abulhawa
“But it’s not only the miles that make the Monarch butterfly’s journey so remarkable — it’s also the means. A typical monarch butterfly lives for only about four weeks, not nearly long enough to complete the journey to the northern U.S. and Canada. So the migration becomes a multigenerational one. In a typical year, it will take four generations for monarch butterflies to finish the seasonal quest their great-grandparents started.”
From “Interesting Facts”
To Refaat Alareer
To the schoolgirls of Minab in Iran
our AI military intelligence
says it seeks
to bomb Iran
at
the speed of thought
but what do those
armed with thoughtlessness
know
about the inner language
singing in our minds?
they would plunge
a speedometer
into our skulls
to find out
they would pulverize
our haiku
into the smithereens
of seconds
of syllables
…and still not know
our thoughts –
from the space they take
to the rhythm they choose –
our thoughts
fly
as free
as Refaat’s kite
the aim of their new war –
the war that trashes
our humanity –
is,
they proclaim,
to cut through the noise
and
compress the kill chain
have they even thought
that the Love in our minds
is ancestral
untethered
and
out of the reach of bombs?
have they even thought
that what they try to measure
is not within
the grasp
of their loveless automatons?
even as we resist
knowing we will win
knowing we are already winning
because
time is long
even as we fight back,
the whisper of Love
that is lost in AI translation
will not speed
will take its time –
the time to smile,
to stop and listen
in the trenches
to the cicadas
thinking so loud
they drown the drones,
the time to slowly share strawberries
grown in gardens
beneath broken stones
the time to read a poem
to one’s child
the time to prepare
the multi-generational return
of the migrating butterflies
we are
(c) Julia Wright March 26, 2026. All Rights Reserved to what remains of the family of Refaat Alareer, to Susan Abulhawa’s playgroundsforpalestine.org and to the steering committee of the Global Sumud Flotilla
WHEN UNSPEAKABILITY TAKES THE FLOOR
for Steve Sweeney
wherewherewhatwhere –
we hear those words
gasped faintly
through dark dust
after the journalist
Steve Sweeney
bearing witness
to ethnic cleansing in Lebanon
is blown up and off screen
in such a blink of an eye
that we rewind
there was a before
and an after
and in between:
the precision targeting
of an Israeli missile
and the explosion
i could not but see
reverberates
behind my eyes
as a timeslip reclaims me
that was a long happy-go-lucky
time ago
when i was skipping
on the tightrope
of childhood’s end
that was when
one sudden day
out of nowhere
i was horse whipped
to a trough
and forced to drink
a gulp
from
the abyss
there was a before
and there was an after
but did i ever find my way
back?
a strange but familiar bitterness
has made its home
in my mouth
and my language
can only stutter
when i try to utter
a recurring absence
of meaning
wherewherewhatwhere –
i still ask myself
each time
the post trauma rises to my throat
i lose my grammar
and my rhymes
do not hold
each time
that lynching
of my innocence
flashes back,
i am blinded
and my poetry turns to stone
and each time
unspeakability takes the floor …
unspeakability
targets my inspiration
and
the code of metaphor
unspeakability
is
that foreign place
off screen
where my exploded voice
gets lost
(c) Julia Wright March 30, 2026. All Rights Reserved.
A PRODIGAL POEM
a recent poem
i wrote
wandered back
windblown and cold
into my dream
and told me
it was lonely
and let me know
it had created
no echo
in readers’ ears
i invited my impatient
but weary poem
to sit down
and rest
and offered it
some hot tea
and
listened
and when the words
i wrote
came back to me
i cradled my poem
in my arms
and gently chided it
and spoke of the childish need
for instant gratification
and gave it a bit of the warmth
and the empathy
it was unreasonable to expect
from our numb-fingered
sleep-deprived
warriors
fighting for us
confronting the icy Spring
of unmelted imperialism
outside –
and whose return
we also await
with the warmth of a lit fire
(c) Julia Wright April 2, 2026. All Rights Reserved.
