Lisa Suhair Majaj: The Poem

The poem was found in the rubble
of a six-story residential building
in Khan Yunis, destroyed by a 2000
pound bomb that sent fire to the sky
and death to the burning earth.

The poem was alive, but bloodied
beyond recognition, trapped
beneath heavy chunks of concrete.
The blast had severed its legs and arms.
The poem could not move.
It could not reach out to rescuers.
It could not find its wounds.

The poem’s face was unrecognizable.
A deep gash across its forehead
revealed the bone within.
The poem’s eyes were filled with blood.
It could not see. The poem’s mouth
was a gaping wound. When it tried
to scream, no sound came out.

The rescuers knew it was important
to save the poem. They dug frantically
with bare hands in the debris, begging
the poem to hold on. When they finally
extracted it from the rubble, passing it
hand to hand to the waiting stretcher,
watchers erupted with joy. The poem
was alive, was returned to its people!

Later, in the hospital, the poem lay
on the bloodied ground, listening
to the screams of children undergoing
amputations without anesthetic,
to the wails of mothers clutching
the bodies of babies to their chests,
refusing to allow them to be taken
to the refrigerated ice cream trucks,
pleading that it was too cold there,
that they could not leave them alone,
that the children would be frightened.

The poem tried to move its absent legs,
its arms, to sense what was left.
It understood that something
had been irrevocably ripped away.
That even if it lived, there were things
it would never do again. The poem
closed its eyes and tried to imagine
a body of light filling the gaping absence
where its limbs used to be.

The poem’s pain was beyond anything
it had experienced before. It tried
to imagine its mouth moving without
pain, tried to imagine a voice emerging
from the bloodied crevice of its jaw,
wondered if it would ever speak again.

The poem wanted it all to stop—
the enormous pain, the cries
of anguish, the echo of how
it had sounded when the bomb
hit with its unimaginable fury,
how it felt when walls crashed down
like the hand of death.

Just then aid workers brought in
a wounded child, laying it
on the floor nearby. The child
was covered in blood, screaming
for its mother. The poem
lay there listening. Slowly
it mustered every bit of strength
it had, and began hum.
It couldn’t get a voice out;
This was the best it could do.

The child’s whimpers subsided
a little, and it turned its face toward
the sound. The poem realized
that even without arms or legs,
even with its face practically torn off,
it still had a job to do. The poem
searched inside itself for the body
of light that had stayed with it
in the rubble, the body of light
it could barely imagine.

Exhausted but determined, the poem
continued to hum. It was difficult,
but better than staying silent. The poem
thought to itself that later on, when
it could manage, it would try to sing
a lullaby, something to comfort the children
whose light still shone in their bodies, who
would need some kind of music to survive.

Copyright 2024 Lisa Suhair Majaj

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.