Darker than Red
Think of a diasporic kaleidoscope: cypress trees and cardamom breeze; a place where domed turquoise mosaics bleed. A century of untreated trauma heals into generational scar tissue until here my dumbass stands trying to remember what’s been forgotten. Just our luck I’ve got an old stab wound inflicting phantom pain as my guiding light.
Lately my spiritual moments happen when the moon’s highest, summoning an o’Falastin: across oceans we erect museums like mausoleums in your honour while your young stand soldier for our living liberation.
The modern Western
call for revolution
opens new pathways
for our posterity
but the bare
necessity for sufficient
freedom fighters remains
shamefully dormant behind
the entertainment industry
and cowards masquerading
as ethical philosophers.
You asked me how I’m doing earlier. In ten months my extended tree’s fallen leaves count close to twenty. There are nights I’m too ashamed to even bear witness. Operations conducted two miles from my ancestral home in Al Bireh; three from Siti’s; aunties and uncles and cousins too.
What new excuse will we conjure as unwelcome guests in the company of First Peoples on Turtle Island? Isn’t the irony of living as displaced settlers on stolen land unbearable?
On July 8, 1972, Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated: car bomb; Mossad operatives in Beirut. There is no evidence he ever drew his gun.
So, Bisan Owda is going to die.
Turning the gaze of a billion-eyed demon from the West away from the so-called West Bank, giving Zion more privacy to rape our nieces and nephews
in peace (pieces).
Glory to our martyrs.
Death to promotion serving self-masturbation
and I guess our enemies too.
Behind every Palestinian life taken
is the kinetic force of a thread-link
snapped and the First Law of
Thermodynamics is always at play.
Radicalize the Right of Return,
—the Right to Resist—
or fade back to an obscurity
darker than red;
for the sake of yourself;
for the sake of ourselves.
