Lisa Suhair Majaj: Two Poems

This is a Body

This is a body.
Body of flesh. Body of bone.
Body of spirit. Body of light.
Body of longing. Body of dreams.
Body of bodies.

This is a body.
Body with a chest broken open.
Body with a skull broken open.
Body with a spirit broken open.
Body without a body.

This is a body, a body!
Body of wonder,
body of hope.
Body of oceans,
body of harbors.

This is a body enfleshed,
like yours. This is a body
broken, like mine. See how
we stutter through rubble,
wounded, till we fall.

This is a body of words,
a body of history,
a body of knowledge.
This is a body of fact
and a body of lies.

Here are the bodies
sprawled in the street
like puppets. The bodies
dangling in frantic peril
from ravaged roofs.

Here are the bodies
seized. The bodies fleeing.
The bodies that stay alive
with eyes that burn, limbs torn off.
The bodies in which we die.

This is a vessel of flesh,
a shipwrecked hull.
Here is the gasping breath,
the vanishing shore.
Here are the ones who drowned.
.
.

Palestine Hologram

Palestine never existed (and never will!) — Hebron settler’s sign
So you and I, Lisa, are holograms. — Nevart Kankashian

.

In the universe of our dispossession, we scatter:
shimmering holograms, phantasms dispersed
to light, dismissed as mirages by the image makers—

though in the universe of our living, alive in our flesh,
we wake Palestinian, breathe Palestinian, sleep
and dream Palestine, touch Palestine to the foreheads

of our children, die Palestinian. Beneath my father’s tombstone
in far America, his bones lie in exile, light-years from home.
But his grave holds only an echo. His spirit, that nebula

of longing, has broken free from the soil that closed above him,
has traveled to the source, splintered soul drinking deep.
One day the laser beams of denial will falter. Till then

we hover, holograms of history: haunted, haunting.

Copyright 2023 Lisa Suhair Majaj. All rights reserved.

Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American writer living in Cyprus. Her poetry, creative nonfiction and critical essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.