without a word
if the word for this is Palestine
this love this steadfastness
if this word becomes again
unutterable unspeakable
if this word
if this work of being
If a word, a life, the life
of a people of a land
is taken disappeared
the time
of this poem
its writing and
of your
you are reading it
now
what then
what then?
what will we do?
you
I who?
will anyone make it stop?
bring it
if the word for this is
Copyright © 2024 by Trish Salah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem was written with an eye toward its own untimeliness, its weakness. Poetry does not prevent massacres. It cannot undo bombs, snipers’ bullets, mass starvation, sickness. The poem invokes the divide between the time of its composition, early January 2024, and the time when it might reach a reader, months or years later. From within that divide, it refuses the inevitability of Palestinian death, the unspeakability of Palestinian resistance, endurance, sumud, and the violent silencing which is everywhere being visited upon the people of Palestine and we who support them. It is something like a prayer, or grief, or condemnation.”
—Trish Salah
Trish Salah
Trish Salah is the author of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, Second Edition (Metonymy Press, 2017) and Wanting in Arabic (TSAR Publications, 2002).