#resistance poetry

[hussyknee]

Today is Refaat Alareer's birthday. He would have been 45 years old.

Dr. Alareer used to manage the social media account of Gaza's Municipality. Please consider donating at least a couple of dollars to Life for Gaza, so that his family might have water to drink, clean and safely dispose of waste. They're 40% short of their goal.

If I Must Die  by Refaat Alareer

If I must die,  you must live  to tell my story  to sell my things  to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, edited by Refaat Alareer

Free PDF on Research Gate. Free EPUB.

Gaza Unsilenced, edited by Refaat Alareer and Laila El-Haddad

Free PDF on Academia.edu. Free EPUB.

[notanecromancer]

When people say, “we have made it through worse before” all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones of those who did not make it, those who did not survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street. I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us. Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left standing after the war has ended. Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

--Clint Smith

posting this poem for Wesley Davies, who told me so

[8pmsunset]

lisa suhair majaj

[purplepencilproject]

A body by the sea

head split open.

In the straight glance of the eyes

that refuse to close even in death

there float: resistance, surprise,

distress, struggle, agony, despair

and an endless great dream

"Body" by Cheran

[i-don-world]

HamasX

Hail and well met brave freedom fighters

after all

one guy's terrorist would be

another guy's freedom fighter

roll out an meet thine enemy

overwhelming in capacity for

genocide

cold cruel genocide

that is IGNORED by a watching

world

and yet

here and there

stands resistance and words of condemnation

to those that would engage in

inhumane war criminality

Hail and well met braver freedom fighters

after all

one guy's terrorist

is another guy's freedom fighter

[runalongprincevaliant]

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Enemy of the Sun

[wouldiweresteadfastasthouart]

Pink Moon, Salena Godden

from Pessimism is for Lightweights: 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance

[dyediris]

[firstfullmoon]

I know it’s not much in the face of everything but I have been finding hope & resilience in palestinian poetry these past few weeks and I created a google drive file of poetry collections by palestinian poets that I will keep updating as I keep on reading. I also recommend checking out @fiercynn’s palestinian poets series for more poets + poetry available online

[rajeshjha111]

फिलिस्तीनी कवि समीह अल कासिम की तीन कविताएं

अनुवाद- राजेश झा कवि परिचय- समीह अल कासिम ((1939-2014) फिलीस्तीनी-इजाराइली कवि, नाटककार एवं उपन्यास लेखक। अरबी भाषा के आधुनिक कवियों में अग्रगण्य। करीब 70 पुस्तकों के लेखक जिनमें अनेक कविता संग्रह भी शामिल। समीह अल कासिम की गिनती फिलिस्तीनी राष्ट्रीय संघर्ष के कवि के रूप में भी होती है। वे अपने को अंतर्राष्ट्रीय प्रतिरोध के कवि के रूप में देखते थे। उन्होंने वियतनाम युद्ध, लैटिन अमेरिकी संघर्ष और…

[chaiaurchaandni]

the last poem written by a Palestinian martyr

read the full poem here!! <3

[hussyknee]

Video description:

Preface reading: "Rafeef Ziadah, 12/11/11, London". The video begins showing a young woman on a stage, her hair cut in a sharp, short bob, wearing a gauzy black dress with red accents to match the stage wall behind her. She speaks into a mic in a blend of Canadian and Palestinian accents:

Transcript: "I'll start with this poem I wrote. This poem—when the bombs were dropping on Gaza I was the media spokesperson for the coalition, doing a lot of the organizing, and we'd stayed up to about six o'clock in the morning perfecting every soundbite and by the end of—you know most Palestinians get tired and start pronouncing our "P"s as "B"s so we could become "Balestinians" by the end of the day. So I was practicing my "P"s all night, and the next morning one of the journalists asked me, "Don't you think it would all be fine if you just stopped teaching your children to hate?"

I did not insult the person, I was very polite, but I wrote this poem as a response to these types of questions we Palestinians always get."

Today, my body was a TV’d massacre. Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits. Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response; and I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions—But still, he asked me, "Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? Pause. I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza. Patience has just escaped me. Pause. Smile. "We teach life, sir." Rafeef, remember to smile. Pause. "We teach life, sir. We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies. We teach life, sir." But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits. And— "Just give us a story, a human story. You see, this is not political. We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story. Don’t mention that word: “apartheid” and “occupation”— This is not political. You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story—" Today, my body was a TV’d massacre. "How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?" "How about you? Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun? Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits." Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood. But they felt sorry. They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza. So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject and— These are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied. And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead. And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile (not exotic), smile (not terrorist) And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, two hundred dead, a thousand dead. Is anyone out there? Will anyone listen? I wish I could wail over their bodies. I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. Today, my body was a TV’d massacre And let me just tell you, there’s nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this. And no sound-bite—no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets—no sound-bite-no sound-bite-no sound-bite-no sound-bite, will bring them back to life, no sound-bite will fix this. We teach life, sir. We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world LIFE. Sir.

End transcription.

I think this twitter thread gives some necessary political context for the poem, so you can really understand the cruelty and barbarity of that question, and why Western media insistently shies away from "political" answers:

Cursory Google check corroborates all the info except for the number of peace settlements Israel's rejected. I can't find the exact number off the first page of Google and my head is throbbing too much to look deeper. I'm going to leave that for y'all to fact check.

(I went and looked Rafeef Ziadah up to check whether she's still alive (because that's what we do with Palestinians now) and she's safe in London, teaching Politics and Public Policy at King's College. You can find the rest of her poetry here.)

[fairuzfan]

[tinystepsforward]

the guerrilla moves among the people as a fish swims through water i sit by the river i condemn the fish. i condemn the water.

Liberal Poem for Palestine, Noah Mazer in Protean Magazine, 1 March 2024

[galina]

June Jordan, 'Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L', from Kissing God Goodbye

[thoughtsfromb4]

The Demagogue

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free

So I can see all of their faces when I cast them back into the sea.

For I have no time to save them, nor be bothered by their fate;

As only I can save the nation from all the Dreamers at the gate.

First, though, I must deal with anyone who does not look or sound like me,

Especially all those sad, bad hombre types who would dare to take a knee.

I mean, they make tons of money right (though not nearly as much as me),

So why should they care if a few are victims of some police brutality?

It's not like they are suffering having all their history erased.

Not like those "fine folks" who’re having their monuments displaced.

Yet there's no need to fear, I know the monuments and parks to be removed,

And with the regulations gone, my new wells and mines can be approved.

And to those pathetic liars who say that this type of order is unfair,

Know that I am simply making room to bury you beside your Obamacare.

And once that’s done I can finally move on to updating our economy;

So that the full 99% are poor and all the rest are rich like me,

Because I know which type of people have suffered most of all — 

The bankers, brokers, and capitalists with their backs against the wall.

And so now you can see the "stable genius" of my “unpresidented” plan:

Stripping all the wealth and liberties from everybody that I can.

Because all the blood and treasure that we've paid for those liberties

Were really spent to secure the wealth of rich old guys like me.

--@thoughtsfromb4