#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.

[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…

[poemsforthesehours]

Poem by Leslie J Anderson.

[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.)

[apoemaday]

Advice to Myself #2: Resistance

by Louise Erdrich

Resist the thought that you may need a savior, or another special being to walk beside you. Resist the thought that you are alone. Resist turning your back on the knife of the world’s sorrow, resist turning that knife upon yourself. Resist your disappearance into sentimental monikers, into the violent pattern of corporate logos, into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism. Resist being consumed. Resist your disappearance into anything except the face you had before you walked up to the podium. Resist all funding sources but accept all money. Cut the strings and dismantle the web that needing money throws over you. Resist the distractions of excess. Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants. Resist your genius and your own significance as declared by others. Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade as tributes to your double. Walk away in your unpurchased skin. Resist the millionth purchase and go backward. Get rid of everything. If you exist, then you are loved by existence. What do you need? A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book — maybe the book you give away. Resist the need to worry, robbing everything of immediacy and peace. Resist traveling except where you want to go. Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you. Nothing, everything, is personal. Resist all pressure to have children unless you crave the torment of joy. If you give in to irrationality, then resist cleaning up the messes your children make. You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix. Resist cleaning up after your husband. It will soon replace having sex with him. Resist outrageous charts spelling doom. However you can, rely on sun and wind. Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle. Resist your own gift’s power to tear you away from the simplicity of tears. Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions, so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph, or to get a laugh. Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human. Resist all chairs. Be the one sitting on the ground or perching on the beam overhead or sleeping beneath the podium. Resist disappearing from the stage, unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face, the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face that has become your own, though all your life you have resisted it.

[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