Just hold me

Hand

Do not

Abandon me

Do not

Write

On the rubble

Of the world

Do not hurt

What you’ve never touched

Never broken

Do not write that

War of words that

Hind Rajab heard when others

Didn’t. When others heard that.

When they shot

When her hands bled red

When her blood muddied

Her head and the words

Stopped

Because the 300 bullets

Would not

Hands that never came never lied

She cried until

Until

Until a tiny part of the warred world

Stood still. Still doing nothing

And doing nothing still

Watching

The world on a screen

The volume still

Screaming its silence

The hand wants to kill

The bullets

The guns

The hearts that

Aim. They should all

Die

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands';

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

T.S. Eliot please stop

Hind has no lilacs in her hands

She has no life to hold

She has no live fingers

She doesn’t know what life is

There are hands that would twist

The necks of

Those who kill

Children and Countries

Those who have friends

Named Oil and Gold

The ones I would happily

Tear in half with

My bare hands but cannot

Kill

Them

Unless their veins run

Not red but purple

Like lilacs broken and

Open atop bullets

Bombs might work too

If they fit in the palm of my hand

But

My hands are broken

Both of them

The war did that

It came quickly

Rained red and smoked

And spoken words were rubble

Just like before

It never stops the

Hands always kill

Hands lose fingers and

Writing never returns

Even for friends with lilacs

With no one to hold them

Then I reach out

Scraping my jagged nails on wind

And dreams And more words blow by me

Cutting, Reminding

Like these: Meditations in an Emergency by Cameron Awkward-Rich:

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

And too wide awake too

I feel the cracking inside

Crack break walk hawking breaking

Bullets in the wind blasting

Red heart institutions built

By hands but I

Can only use mine to barricade

My stupid heart caring more

About poetry than the twisted stems of

Violets and children like Hind or those

With a thousand nights in which to

Keep telling their deceased stories with

Broken doves so stupidly born

From nests lined with the feathers of mines

I can barely control

The lines here

The space here

The explosion over there and

Nearby. Next to a genocide of

Hands nobody comes to claim

Why does a hand betray us

When

All we want is to write the worlds

That should not die

Maybe hearts are in fact stupid

Maybe born like that or made

Praying, that two-handed gesture,

For two hands that can never aim

At hearts or heads or little girls in cars

Surrounded by dead bodies and bleeding

This story is too long, its knives too short but willing to torture

Successfully, and I don’t want to hit the target or make it spurt round

Like a blood onion with no flavor

Nobody will eat that

300 blossoms or 3000 according to the appetite

The chef runneth over to the dish that’s been offered

To fill the cup that runneth over as well

We are all running one way or another

We are all bloody

Our arms and hands are all flailing

Whether we have any left or not

We burn brokenly

With abandon

Leaving hands behind

Hearts misplaced and missing aortas

Hand

Do not

Abandon me

Hands come back to

The page where you once wrote

Family Books Gaza

Looking for an answer but forgetting it until I remember

Sirāt the daughter with no name

Only a face nobody can find

Only gone in the desert with mines nobody needs

Why?

There ain't no answer.

There ain't going to be an answer.

There never has been an answer.

That's the answer.

Because Gertrude Stein knew the answer I forgot to know

And she proved it by cutting through everything until

Morphemes of many sorts were bloody lying about about the kitchen

Table with many sharp knives that decreated a knight only a few could

Bear to remember. Red pulp everywhere. Refusing to leave until

Balled up in a rose that was a rose that is still a rose

Faded now but still bleeding for lack of an answer for a fetus

But if roses and little girls can die while trying not

To dirty their clothing then surely bad men

Deserve to die soon and at whose hands?

A big stick is pointing at me

A big stick is pointing at my hand

A big gun is aiming at my bloodied heart and insists

The little girls at school learning are no longer able to kill

The girl in the car no longer responds

The children with their parents walking to the border are now

An invisible vermilion and

Are unable to kill

Agency is missing everywhere

I look at my crumpled hands in hiding

I speak with them

They know nothing of praying but they can read

They know I know

They know about Eliot, Awkward-Rich, Stein, maybe Carson and

They wait for my answer

So far written only with bruised broken elbows

They know whose turn it is

They hiss their insistence

It is my cue since a rose is a rose must be a crimson m7rose

Do not abandon me now

Hand

Do not fail to write the rubble

Do not forget to dissect the source of it all

Kill the evil that started it all (do not name)

Give me strength

With or without prayer

Do not abandon me now

Strong arm

Unerring Hand

Belonging to all

My Hand