January 12
GUEST: Zeina Azzam, Palestinian
American poet, writer, community activist, and Poet Laureate
of Alexandria, Virginia, reads some of her poetry and talks
about the resistance of her people.
Zeina
Azzam background
Can poetry be part of the resistance? Does poetry skirt our usual analysis based on reason and caution? Does it make its way into our hearts before we can make judgements about its appropriateness?
Here is one of Zeina's poems on Palestine. Read it and then tell me what you experienced. I will gladly pass along your comments to her.
To the Israeli Officer Who X-rayed and Swabbed Our Mother’s Ashes
Even though you looked me in the eye
my peripheral vision was stuck on the machine gun
cradled in your colleague’s jittery arms next to me.
Your questions were like jagged metal soldiers
on a conveyor belt, a continuous barrage,
the same sharp words coming steadily,
marching toward my brother and me.
All the supervisors who came, all those
young military minds with colorful stripes
trained in war but with no grasp of our grief,
of a Palestinian heart, of a simple desire
to return homeward.
To you, these were just salt crystals
in an engraved wooden box
you must run through the x-ray machine twice,
swab all around, carry as if a purse, a sack of books.
To us, those were our mother’s remains
from an unholy world that kept her far away from her homeland
for 71 years, made her a refugee everywhere she went.
You will never know who our mother was.
My brother and I would have told you that
we were carrying what was left of her because
you wouldn’t let her living body come back,
you wouldn’t allow a refugee and her family
to return to Nazareth.
But after your razor-like interrogation ended
and our halting answers were enough,
we crossed your checkpoint and continued our journey.
We buried her ashes in the Palestine she knew.
Our Palestinian mother finally exercised her right of return.
