Words by Banah El Ghadbanah
Featured image: Tree Hugger by Jaafar Ashtiyeh, Palestinian woman on the picture is Mahfouzah Oudeh
This article is part of the “Sana wara Sana” issue
fruit
Heaven is just a backyard
with flowers and fruit trees,
Jiddo always said
-my sister
My breasts are two floppy mountains.
I don’t desire much; the air ripples
with heat. The helicopters drone
overhead in case we try to plan
revolutions. The protests fizzle out
into yet another committee and I
hold a fistful of jasmines to my
face wondering how quickly I
have forgotten my language,
wondering if I’ll ever find sham
again; the cradle of Babylon,
the valley of blessings, where
soreeya, libnan, & falasteen meet,
the apricots my Teta planted.
I pour water on my head to ward
away summer heat and remember
the Barada filled with blood, the
streets of Tunis after the revolution
wet with grief, a grey unending winter,
another committee. Where did we
leave the harvest’s seeds? The parsley
in spotted clusters asks us to end
the wreckage. My auntie has lost
ninety members of her family in Gaza:
her eyes soften when she mentions
the grief and I catch her gaze on a
faraway horizon lingering onto
red stained clay under four
hundred-year-old olive trees.
Cousins
for your heart: love has no land,
no homeland, no address
-Nizar Qabanni
There is a web of love
that stretches over blue water
it hums under mountains
between lips in a kiss.
It crowns all of Bilad al Sham
the limbs of Lebanon
the spine of Syria, the
poetry of Palestine.
We merge
into one sky where my
friend’s eight cousins were
burned alive in a tent in Rafah-
block 1432—I should
be clear, and follow the web
the Zionist army
burned my
friend’s eight cousins alive.
I remember my eight cousins who fled
chemical weapons attacks
in Douma—I should
be clear and follow the web,
Assad’s army
shot at my cousins’ car as they
piled in, eight people with
bullet holes pulsing through
steel, under clouds of white
phosphorous, they fled.
There’s a hunger strike in
Ethiopia, Sudanese refugees
on their fifth day, or we should be
clear, and follow the web, the
UAE and RSF and Zionists
have forced them to flee, hunger rages
through the heat, also my cousins
—and what is a cousin?
Kin who are sun gods and
leaves of the same tree, ghusn
al Ban lines downtown Khartoum
and my name sprouts from them.
Cousins reveal our entanglement
our webs of love
like a solar movement,
a ray of light splits into parallel beams
barefoot and naked on sand,
laughing by the Dead Sea.
My cousin was burned alive
in his car on the highway in Utah.
Outside of time, none of us
were killed crouching under
bombs or in bodies
of steel. None of us
were broken from the web
or became a new
geography in the stars.