Try to think ‘bones’ like a realtor—I can’t
see past the small, good
bodies / We shape
watermelons on poster paper, letters
F R E E, F R E E
and her child’s P, A, L
form like stick figure people.
I don’t know anything
closer than her
small good hands—voice—touch— / A baby
has a birthday and I learn her name
is ‘close’ in Arabic. A girl
knows her mother by her hair.
It is unbearable / please don’t look
away. My daughter makes
her Es small, curls carefully
the S, ‘little snakes’[1]— A writer
shares what comes down
to: ‘you don’t have to feel bad
to feel joy during a genocide.’
A doula shares it, shares nothing
in support of parents searching
for their children in rubble. Small good
bodies I can’t think of
figuratively, under whole
apartment blocks— An uncle
tells his niece rescued on a stretcher she is alive
and ‘beautiful as the moon.’
My child does a T like a tree trunk, branches, sturdy
as her I, N, e / Her favourite’s an olive / Her small good
hands working, filling watermelon
seeds, rind, flesh. Faltering
through the poem, blanking lines so they go
‘Life is / I keep / my child- / loved’ The girl’s
mother is murdered, the baby’s father one
of [ … ] journalists killed days before
her first birthday—where
I catch the passive voice, revise— Another writer
says she doesn’t
have a political bone
in her, and I find my figurative bones
to pick / find expressions inconceivable: ‘a graveyard
for children’[2] / ‘the children of Gaza
have brought this upon themselves / there is no
symmetry’[3] / Where girls thread
bracelets bearing names in anticipation, beads
resting over whole, good bones.
I have never been good
with numbers, but know
pauses for four out of twenty-four hours only
underscore the horror / know the names
of the dead won’t fit
a yellow school bus, city street,
while Trudeau’s tongue slips
over ‘cease’—sounds
out weasel wording / shapes
a green light— Everyone is
practising self-care, it seems /
impossible to hold
a metaphor, like a poem / useless
witness to entire
worlds obliterated, what’s
held in a pause— what fits
a protest poster. Try to think
‘bones’ like a realtor: I can’t
but Harey Zahav does—‘a house on the beach
not a dream’[4], obscene
outlines, outsizing satire. Art objects
—resists—in shapes of kite and bird. ‘Yes
shame on them,’ overheard as the march
turns a corner, a woman holds hands
over her ears, refuses wit(h)ness[5].
Lara Elborno says, ‘Every day is the worst day’
and Noura Erakat: ‘Genocide is not better
if facilitated with empathy.’
Hala Alyan asks ‘Whose names
are on the bombs? Whose
sharpie hearts?’ I think
of Hiba Abu Nada’s poem of stars
and galaxies / closing in— her lines
‘Do not die’— / ‘O little light in me’—
Of Refaat Alareer holding
Gazan strawberries in Mosab Abu Toha’s
photograph. Saying (days before his murder)
‘The toughest thing
I have at home is an Expo marker’
But how he’d use it
From: Vol.12 N.01 – The Braided Gift
Art Objects, or, Live Document
by
Jo Langdon