To you, a Palestinian poet who berates,
I try to walk a mile in your poems,
to read the world in your shoes, feel
your fear as though transplanted
from the shifting soil that is Barbados
into your own strip of turmoil,
oceans away.
I pore over diaries, words; raw
outpouring of what it is like for you,
your children and families.
And too many others like you, what you be doing
while bombs rain down like…well, rain.
Poet, I carry your world with me
into classrooms, read the stories
to children who, after they’ve got through
scraping their chairs and my nerves, listen—
they really do. They want to know
this is going on right now, ma’am? And yes, I saw it
on the news pun my cell phone and you know, ma’am,
all this in the Bible, it now coming true is all and I can’t imagine
living where bombs falling and this tiny Buhbayduss
couldn’t survive that, could barely stan’ hurricane.
Others just listen and their understanding and lack of
understanding is like a next bombardment, fleeing, a flight
of thought and words.
Sometimes there is nothing to say or write or do, is there?
Sometimes all you can do is feel.
Poet, I signed a petition for you.
Safe route for your family and you to the US,
to sanctuary. And you get through. Give thanks,
you get through! I am pleased but not about being told off:
you wanting to know where our words, our poems are!
I call myself poet, like you, but sometimes, words scatter,
take flight, run for cover, shelter in place, waiting.
Apartheid I have yet to write about, Rwanda, the Sudan,
Haiti, Middle Passage, George Floyd, and me, too. Waiting
for word on reparations. Are you any less of a poet
because I do not hear from you
on these things?
A third-former says all she recalls of our sessions together
is an entry from a diary about a man and his sister fleeing
bombardment, safe house to safe house in Gaza, backpacks
with only the essentials—money, cell phones, chargers,
a bit of food and water, change of clothes, maybe—and, wait for it,
two cats! In crates. Two terrified pet owners running, without knowing
for sure, for shelter.
A child an ocean away
where we dodge hurricanes,
not bombs, remembers this.
Poet from Palestine who berates, I must tell her when I can that they gained more cats and lost some, last I heard. That the diaries have ceased though the war goes on.
I have not written until this, until now, but these thoughts as words, and therefore deeds, are for and with you, and another of your poets since killed, and the little girl aged six, trapped in a car under fire, and the aid workers mistaken for the enemy, and the refugees in schools and hospitals turned burial grounds. For all the children, everywhere, starving.
Poet, have I planted a seed, a star that can do more than this poem? Brought one glimmering speck, a firefly lighting up the dark across oceans, while man and Mother Nature do their worst on either side?