Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking)

What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.
                —Mahmoud Darwish, “To a Young Poet”

Because I should’ve wrote this years
ago, I’m crying. So what my slow
failure pass the years
  Make me be crying. So what
in Bethlehem I tried to push so
much against it, where the Wall is
checkpoint and weird. So what
  My lonelier, sadder blackeraches
kept from me a heard resonance with
the land thought against my body, so
what.
I arrived.

2. CHECKPOINT
And have known some privilege.

3. CHECKPOINT
And have seen some freedom.

4. CHECKPOINT
I mean, I told myself No, you shouldn’t
compare it—myself to Palestine—no,
I—

5. CHECKPOINT
But I compared it, drew that wound,
leaned into a kind of pity so new to me
who—

6. CHECKPOINT
—was so used to being all base &
bottom of the world; I tried, but felt
that distant, thieving love dilate my
eyes.

7.
And I cried, softly.

8.
So what I had not asked for, did not
want this. So what. I thought Tears
cheapened it, sissy’d it. So what.
     But was a newprivilege I met as
salt Slipped, downed and furthered
my face, an

     AMERICAN
                And then Black

privilege began to describe me.
Imagine that! I was some doubler
consciousness again,
  me watching four boys swing their
joy on an old couch-on-wheels
  Before that Wall’s forestalling
future, so who greeted them first was
my tears; they’re playing a game.

9.
A song: Palestine keeps a divided
home, where Blackness only roams.

10.
The tears! But panic I could call a film
for this frame that’s guilt, the next is
friendship: Am I what in Palestine?
  Or is it my “voice” insisting
the story, by certain marks, in
whisperings—What do I mean
  by Spirit?—of warring, intifada,
blood like Dew in the fields....
  The story is true.

11. THE WALL
Killings are thrilling, the Wall said,
and casual:
  (1) little infant trying—;
  (2) women in their—;
  (3) dogs sleeping;
  (4) boys.
  —What do I mean by Spirit?— The
birth of a nation means alway the
death of a former one.

12.
Sitting here near ole Bayou Road,
again all spleen. The Palestinian men
I try with my eyes stare back half-
meanly; they don’t know I know they
know I’m trans—but I am the lady,
herself, within. Fiercely her walk
pierces a New Orleans’ slick night.
They like it.

13. THE WALL
But I was saying the birth of a nation

means always the death of a second
one.
  Israel is real, trifling, in someone’s
mind.

14. I felt that. I was persuaded. The
film peeling across my eyes, only one
Palestine,
  Made protest against this fact
untenable, as if myself I could see in
those fields,
  Saw too the theft and strangle of
myself.

15. SOLIDARITY EXISTS
What’s solid in solidarity—All I know
is still nooses, crosses; still thorns—
then it was white phosphorus forming
the quick shadow of a boy called
Freedom—in whispering, in curtains
mark—I’m somehow a distance from.
  Admission is a later knowledge, I
think. A right of return.

16.
A slower knowledge. To know it was
my want to see myself as that boy I
was seeing, that ache again and in
myself to be, blackerache, the one
most hurt.

17.
Admission is a graver
knowledge, I think, trick
privilege, instance when,
tonight Maryam reminds
me,
  Recalled to just-that-
where White phosphorus is made.

“Arkansas, baby! oh, yeah—”
  I wonder if Palestine can
be Black? A Nigga be
Filinistina?
  And creole twain.
“And it pass right thru”—
peculiar—“that Port of New Orleans.”
Orleans.”
  Can—

18. CHECKPOINT
(They’re playing game)
  —they keep a divided home, where
how Blackness only roams?
  Friend. “Oh, it’s sick—”

18. CHECKPOINT
Light slides across the face of a body.
Dark does.

19. CHECKPOINT
The next shot is familiar:
  rows of cotton dipped in historical
red; burnt cork; crows; rows of bullets
ripped into some resembling, slum
skin, ache—
  But—

20. CHECKPOINT
—Try again: they are soldiers I am
seeing, Israeli, only the present tense,
I should’ve said this years ago.
  I should’ve made this article
confession, spelled out between poem
and novel years ago. Tall lyric, a space
of briar ambition and its mess of all
the violences witnessed—

21.
—and the beauty.
  I should loathe this gravity, of
those violences, these easy collisions I
make from item to idea or like to like.
  But I love to like, to raise the lyric
analogy and have you consume: the
way an eye carries down the page;
down the shallow energy of my head
voice now; because I bid it do, to the
hilt—

22. SEMICOLON —to the silt. These built up
semicolons, the top dot like the
soldier’s rifle target, the comma
dangling for how the dead do give
pause, I should hate it;
  I should spit, I should—

23. WANT
—need the harder thinking,
which is rigor gammed with care,
the possibility of that, that’s all,
unmannered, uneven—
  Like some New Orleanian unique
South, that occupies the psychot of
my brain’s desire, words I worry into
existence.

24. FREEDOM BEGS
Let’s say the freedom of poetry can be
the danger of it, could be the draw? So
what?
  Tried in Jerusalem; tried in
Hebron—
  But I saw everything I needed to
see in the labored chain-work of the
overhanging canopy that keeps—those
whisperings, certain marks—rocks
from falling on the shopkeepers’
heads;
  Took a video of the Palestinian
man who said, “Go back. Tell it.”

25. Who wants a pacifying gospel
delivered knows I cannot please them,
knows I cannot sincerely stop these
telling tears.

26. NIGHT-WALKING WOMAN
Yet I walk, eyes like a lady’s reminded
to my purpose with truth. Palestine
cries a divided home, where Blackness
bedamned to roam, and we share a
Dome.
  Friend, look in my eyes. To have
no home is yet a difference from the
denial of return, and don’t we both
ache for home?
  Slavery is true; as Occupation
remains true; as a sky cross-stitched
and beaded with turning danger is true:
Together our nights singly moan.

27.
I mean, I have not stopped this ego
rolled down my cheeks and who asked
for witness?

28. WITNESS
I first saw myself as the shame I took
fully for myself, those years ago—
  But was written away from it.

29. A free world, I think, is possible. I am
persuaded.
  I saw it in the still-for-singing
beauty of the land, how Palestine
makes a gold hum in my mouth. Saw
it in the not-now-warring, rolling hills
of Ramallah my feet at least tried to
walk frankly in and felt—

30. CHECKPOINT
—yes, a resonance. What could I
imagine now?

31. CHECKPOINT
What new eyes could I claim?

32. CHECKPOINT
What must you admit, really, to be
free?

33. CHECKPOINT
That I tried my body landing and
and thinking completely
Palestine, so what.

34. CHECKPOINT
And was I wrong?

Notes:

I first arrived in Palestine, through the Jordan corridor, with the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016, accompanied by such elites as J. M. Coetzee and Saidiya Hartman. Though Hartman, the only other Black American on the caravan, passed through easily, I was barred for an hour at the first checkpoint. How come?

Where I mention “doubler consciousness” I refer to W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of Black persons’ double consciousness, which keeps divided interests between Blackness and what he called “Americanness” (or whiteness) ever within the confines of Black life. Can there be more?

Where I mention “slum,” see the aforementioned Saidiya Hartman and her expansive theory on the afterlives of slavery and their impact on what she calls the “fungible body.” The slum, she theorizes, is where we find such marked bodies. But is that the only place?

I want to thank Sharif Abdul Koddous and all the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature; Kristina Kay Robinson, in whose seminal, performance project Republica: Temple of Color and Sound we meet Maryam DeCapita; and Ru Freeman, John Hennessy, and Emily Everett for all their various help in (re)shaping and shepherding this poem toward its present form. But is it done?