POETRY & PHOTOGRAPHY – Confessions at Midrange: The Voices and Faces of Palestine – Summer, 2014

by Nathalie Handal

Confessions at Midrange

My heart has telescopes

my eyes have invisible streets

my portrait is of a nation

with a hundred square feet of clouds—

maybe god is a country

my eyes can’t see.

Turka

They ask me who I am,

they ask me where I’m from—

how do I explain

from where Jesus is born

except I’m not allowed

to reach his church

Who am I if I can’t be

with my olive groves

who am I

if I can’t find Mohammed

in my prayers

can’t reach Jesus

I am from the Teqoa

and the Dead Sea

from Bethlehem

and Jerusalem—

Dar Handal,

we grow everywhere here,

Dar Talamas,

our ancestors were translators,

so I translate this for you—

I am who I’ve always been

and behind my prayers

are windows

with a city

of endless verbs.

Country

The radio was stuck

between two stations

when you told me

you sold

the only thing that

mattered to you.

I said nothing.

We’d been together for years

and I had no idea what you sold

nor what was playing

along the long blue sky

we both insisted was ours.

Exit Song

from The Gaza Box

To peal off what only you could have engraved

To dig for songs in songs you will never find

To steal faces that don’t belong to you

To find what you thought was danger

To break doors made of clouds

To tear stillness from a crib

To watch a wounded man

look for someone he loves

head after head after heads

bodies elsewhere elsewhere

To watch a sister sew a sister

To walk through graves and

more graves that will respond

quietly with their silence

there is nothing like a death

that won’t go away

Night Sky Orange

from The Gaza Box

I read your book of myths—

did you?

I checked the mirror for your face—

did you?

I checked the ruins and the even larger

ruins in your heart—

did you?

I memorized the shape of black smoke

and the orange sky in every tiny corpse—

did you?

I checked if loneliness was what the body

turns to when death is all it has—

did you?

Did you think of your wife the evening

you killed mine?

And unexpectedly,

an image of your son will cross

your mind,

you will question why

you’ve come after all,

you will breathe differently,

words will no longer be able

to map your crimes.

I checked for the damage in my flesh

—did you?

I found my way back to the scene

in the book

where you erase my name

as it keeps reappearing,

don’t you know,

such letters always revert back

to its original form

so look at me in the eyes

before we both perish.

Imaginary World with Twelve Birds

from The Gaza Box

There is moonlit

in my box

can you give it to me

There are hours

in my box

can you give them to me

There is a world

in my box

there are twelve birds

in my box

can I fly with them ummi

…………………

There is a picture

of my son

in his box

can I see it

before the men arrive

before the floor shakes

before they take my heart

tell them

our souls will leave our torn bodies

but we will never leave

we will multiple in their souls

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Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is from Bethlehem, Palestine, was raised in France and Latin America, and educated in the United Kingdom, the USA and the Arab world.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes, “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders…One of the most important voices of her generation.”

She is the author of numerous books, most recently the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, whichAlice Walker lauds as “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve,” and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

From the Wild River Review Archives: Love and Strange Horses – An Interview with Nathalie Handal
» View all articles by Nathalie Handal

ISSN: 1932-362X