Hajer was kind enough to read to us in Arabic in our last Poetician get together in Dubai.
Even people who did not speak arabic were moved by her stance, he physicality,
her deep voice and husky tones, her clear strong eyes and rigid, courageous body. Here, I am copying one of her poems in English. Soon, I will post her Arabic one. Welcome, Hajer, hope you will always join us.

ps. She is Palestinian… am just sayin!

Definition of a Hand

It is your hand I remember
Not your face
The colour of your eyes
Or the deep cleft in your chin
But your hand
A marvel
That’s what I thought
Your left hand
The back of it
The dorsum
Its shape
The weight of it
I will take it with me to the grave
Left hand falling like thunder on left cheek
My left cheek
The imprint of your alma mater ring tattooed on it until now
A birth mark
Nails so white and clipped,
A well-taken-care of hand
Knuckles giving way to dark hairs like grass on a meadow
Once
I could swear it happened
I slept there
But then your ring
your fraternity ring on my cheek
Right above the jaw
Where I bled for hours
Tells me I must be wrong
How could I have ever slept on barbed wires?

The palm I do not remember
No life lines or money lines or marriage lines
The palm always pointing away from me
A dismissing hand
The dorsum is another story
Diminishing
Demeaning
Blood vessels connecting with arteries
And the skin
A tight drum with a muting sound
I cannot hear with my left ear any longer
But I have the mark of your ring
Forever

The wrist
Right where the leather strap of your watch is a creamy circle
Is where my eyes stop
I unhinge it
Take it aside
Your hand
Palm up
And set fire to it

Not now
But I will
I will
All 27 bones
(a prehensile appendage for physical manipulation
according to Wikipedia)
Physical manipulation of the backward blow
Finger stretched so straight
I could have woven a shroud around them
A heinous sight

My mother was a weaver of lies
People looked at you
And envied her
She is dead now
My mother

Hajer

Loving, loving, missing this, and words that are inside skin, love love love.

“Immigrant Blues” by Li-Young Lee

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It’s an old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”

It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,”

called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”

Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and the soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

Its been such a mad couple of weeks, poetry has been left to suffer. I apologize to the probably non-existant reader out there who may have suffered -aha- without poems for the past few days…hmmm, as always, I start these little silly blog notes without knowing what poem I shall offer up today, and it starts to dawn on me after a while…so far, nothing, maybe because my uncaffienated brain is focused on travel and packing and certain brown eyes and work and phone calls and whether living in dubai is something I can really do well, as opposed to passively experience.

I will stop, make some coffee and find you a good poem (or two) to apologize for this lame update.

Why We Sing
by Mario Benedetti

If every hour comes with its death
if time is a den of thieves
the wind is no longer a good
and life is nothing more than a moving target

you might ask, why do we sing?

if our bravos are left without support
our homeland dies from sorrow
and the heart of man is smashed to pieces
even before the shame explodes

you might ask, why do we sing?

if we’re as far away as the horizon
and if over there were left the trees and the sky
if every night is always some sort of absence
and if every waking is a missed encounter

you might ask, why do we sing?

We sing because the river is calling
and when the river calls, the river calls
we sing because cruelty has no name
and destiny does have a name

we sing because the child and because all
and because someday and because the people
we sing because the survivors
and our dead want us to sing

we sing because to shout is not enough
and the crying and the cursing is not enough
we sing because we believe in people
and because we will defeat failure

we sing because the sun recognizes us
and because the fields smell of spring
and because in this stalk in that fruit
every question has its answer

we sing because it rains over the furrows
and we are the militants of life
and because we neither want nor can
allow the song to be turned to ashes.

and one more of my favorites:

A poem by palestinian poet TAHA MOHAMED ALI. Sad, so sad.

REVENGE

At times …
I wish I could meet
in a duel
the man who
killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put his
right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise …
I would not murder him if
it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his presents thrilled.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from the tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and with no kin or friends or neighbors
and neither colleagues nor companions …
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth, 2006

I have had a very love filled day and it looks like its about to continue. Nice to have birthday hugs thrown
at me all day. I dont know what this year will bring, but it seriously is a good start. I will post the second asha bandele poem, to remind us of all the glory and power that rests in our bodies. enjoy.

body-n-soul

i didn’t mean for my towel to drop or to be standing nude in front of the
full length mirror the other morning…but there we were, trapped,
the three of us: me, the mirror, and my naked body.

i’ve avoided being nude in front of myself for years…i have hated my
body for nearly as long as i’ve had one
i’ve been a million different sizes in my life, but never quite the right size…
my skin was never quite the right shade….
always too light or too dark depending upon
who i was with.

it’s not as though i don’t know better…
i’m embarrassed to know as many theories as i do
and still be in struggle.

i know that the american aesthetic is perverse, anti-woman
and bounded by a solely western sense of beauty…i know
that even americans did not demand this image of prepubescent fragility
in women until well into this century…i know the
wideness of my hips makes biological sense…
and i know a million other feminist theories and truths….
i have books filled with highlighted paragraphs to prove that i have studied
and
understand these self-affirming things…but knowing that doesn’t change
the way i’ve felt for at least the last 15 years.

i am ashamed to say that i hate my body
but it has been my enemy for so long now
& i know somewhere that the real enemy has been the various reactions
that my body has created in other people who have their own
issues biases agendas and afflictions
but it’s easier to attack my 5’6″, lightskinned, 142 pound frame…
i have no power over the men who pay me/my body attention
i never wanted
or dispelled affections i desperately needed
depending upon my state of fatness or thinness…

but this body is mine, i can
stairmaster
diet, jog, powerwalk and starve into submission.

i don’t want to live this way.

i want to see the value of my body in the creative framework of what it
does despite its conformity or non-conformity to the western tradition
i want to value the body i have which has always been able to hold and
to love
to dance, walk, write poems, clean houses, massage my sister, rise every
morning and
try try try
to contribute to another life.
which like mine,
is struggling for something we hesitantly call
peace.

I dont know what poem to post for you today. I will think about it while I randomly type things in here that do not necessarily need to be posted for the general lovely public to waste precious…ahh, I found it.
I think one by Anne Sexton. Great poet, one of my favorite poems. Enjoy.

For my lover, returning to his wife.
Anne Sexton

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission —
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound —
for the burying of her small red wound alive —
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call —
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.