Three Poems

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Oct 10, 2024 Palestine
Three Poems

Three Poems

By : Anees Ghanima

I

It’s half past 1 AM

I’m still happy

I lived a normal day

I woke up very alone

and will go to sleep alone as well

 

With peace of mind

Without hugging

I tell the world:

It makes no difference

Be as you wish!

 

I wake up with birds

I sleep next to dogs

I take care of a scabby stray cat

and gazelles that volunteered

for poems that don’t run

I have the features of a foreigner

Or a stranger in exile

I keep a homeless man’s sign on my forehead

I look like a ghoul when I laugh

and a maggot when I cry

Street cleaners and vendors know me

 

My clothes are dirty

My pockets have holes

There is a vegetable market and buyers in my head

There is free fruit in my heart

 

There is no place

None of the maps are good

My house is built with the sins 

of a woman I left

I sing alone inside it

I sleep alone

I dream of no one

I remember no one

I wish a one-eyed gardener would prophecy me

Just see me with his snuffed eye

I dream of being the tree I climbed

In childhood

To have a million arms 

To play with these snakes

of having an extinct insect celebrate me

I dream that my progeny

Ends before even beginning

 

II 

Kamil, who was probably going to top his senior class in high school this year, was killed four months after his family evacuated to Rafah. Later, his mother used the books he brought along to kindle the fire and bake bread. Whenever she tore a page, she remembered him: “He used to love this class.” “He loved this subject” and so on. She would then bring out the loaf of bread, look long at it, and would cry. Her warm tears on that loaf are a declaration that this whole world has collapsed.

 

III

Three months into the war they brought a group of martyrs to the mortuary freezer in a small hospital. One of them was a seven-year-old girl. It was the first time I saw “unknown” written on a shroud. Every day, before I go to sleep, I invent a name for her. I read her a story. Every night, I see, once again, her closed eyes.

 

Anees Ghanima lives in Gaza City where he was born. He is a poet and web programmer. He received the “Young Writer Award in Poetry” from the A. M. Qattan Foundation in (2017).

[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon]

 

 
Apr 6, 2017 Lebanon
York College Galleries By :
York College Galleries

Helen Zughaib: Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys)

Late last year York College Galleries in Pennsylvania hosted Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys), the solo exhibition of artist Helen Zughaib.

The exhibition’s featured paintings, installations, and conceptual works were created between 2008 and 2016. In these years, Zughaib watched the 2008/2009 attack on Gaza from afar, responding with scenes of grief-stricken, weeping women paralyzed beneath the fall of bombs. She also returned to her native Lebanon for the first time since fleeing war-torn Beirut in the 1970s, and produced a series of text-based paintings. Later she was hopeful when uprisings swept across North Africa and the Middle East, cloaking her figures in spiraling floral patterns; but soon began to document the number of Syrian civilians killed since 2012 with a series of public performances and related images. More recently, she has created a number of conceptual works that describe the difficulties of the mass migration that has swept across Europe from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, particularly for children.

Narrated by the artist, the short film below (produced by York College Galleries) takes viewers into Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys), revealing what inspired many of the included works and how concepts and forms aim to record the mounting devastation of this time.

Thanks to Matthew Clay-Robison, director of York College Galleries, for allowing Jadaliyya to feature this film.  

Helen Zughaib at York College from Jadaliyya on Vimeo.