Impossible Poem

for Suheir Hammad, Palestinian poet

Is there a tent

where we could sit together?

Eretz Yisrael: Your father’s stolen house,

the olive branches split.

You sing of his lost ocean

wherever you go.

Who could hear that and not weep?

My Grandmother whispered as they herded her

into the wooden car, Eretz Yisrael,

as she watched her bony mother

marched to the smokestacks—

My mother was born in Palestine.

First flecks of golden desert

through the barbed wire of a British holding camp—

What milk, what honey there?

I know about the massacre

at Deir Yassin, about the wall

destroying the fields of Bil’in.

Noam Rozenman was sixteen,

strolling Ben Yehuda street

when the bomber pulled the cord—

Suheir, what tent, what field,

what hands laid bare, Eretz Yisrael

what wheat, salted bread what

olive branch unsnapped, what

poem, what can write the land,

Palestina, wide enough to hold us both,

our bodies woven

into bend and lift,

bend and lift; our hands

curved toward harvest,

curved in prayer.

Once in a village that burned,

before it burned, lived a young woman

who loved a young man and they waltzed

through the streets smelling of horse-shit

and bread (The skinny dogs

loped behind for a scrap)—

All night in separate beds they dreamed

a feast: fat wheat and cows, hills of clean soil, their hands

deep in it, and across the insides of their skulls, the name

in flaming letters, the name of the land.

When she made it there— her arms like strands of hair, her hair

in strings of rotting teeth— she could not see

the young man’s face. Her after-the-war-husband

seventeen years older, and bald, and their daughters                        

who never would have been

if the town hadn’t burned—

Naming our dead:

Alma. al-Ashrafiyya. Abu Shusha.  Ajjur.  Artuf. Abramowo. al-Bassa. al-Bira. Babiak. Bayt Jirja. Belz.  Bialystock. Bi’ina. Biriyya. Burkanow. al-Baqqara. Busk. Braslow. Chmielnik. Chodorow.  Chomsk. al-Damun. Danna. Deir Yassin. Dimra. al-Dirdara. Dolzka. Dvinsk. Druja.               Dworzec.     Dubno. Ejszyszeki. Filipow. Fir’im.           Farwana.    al-Faluja. al-Fatur. Grodek. Grodno.                 Gdansk. Ghajar. al-Ghazzawaiyya. Golina. Glinki.               Horodek. Hajnowka. al-Hamra. al-Hiquab. Harrawi. al-Husayniyya. al-Hindaj. Ilnik. Ilintsky. Indur. Iqrit. Ijzim. Jaroslaw. Jurze. Jahula. Jabbul. Jazayir. Jedwabne. Jadow. Jubb Yusef. Janowiec. Kabara. Kafr Bir-im. al-Khisas. Kirrad. Kulikow.                         Korzec.

Khubbayza. Koropiec. Krynki.                    Korolowka. Kafr’Ana. Lesko. Lobzenica.                            Lutomiersk. Lifta. al-Lajjun. al-Lydd. Lysiec.             Ludmir. Lubya. Ma’lul. al-Mansura. al-Mazar.Mielnik. Mezhirech. Mughallis. al-Mirr. Myslowice. Miedzno. Mogilno. Nitaf. Nowogrodek. Nadworna. Niebylec. Nawaqir. al-Nahr. Nuris.  Ostrozec. Obryzycko. Oslakow. Ostryna. al-Omour. Piatkowa.                 Piaski. Plonsk. Pryzybyszew. Qumya. Qisarya.                 Quannir. Qira. Radzilow.        Rudki. Rantiya                               Ras Abu’Amar. Rejowic. Rakow. Rogozhin.                     Sambor. Stawaski. Sabbarin. Saqiya. Sniadowo.                  Strzeliska. Sha’ab. Sirin. Turze. Trembowla. Tarnow. Tarbikha. Ustrzykie. Ulanow. Umm al-Shawf. Warez. Wizna. Wadi’Ara. Wojnilow. al-Walaja. Yajur. Yubla.Yaquq.  Zabludow.  Zir’in.  Zarnuqa.   al-Zeeb.

                                          ...and I could never name them all