The following is a selection from our monthly poetry series BEIT. Mondoweiss recognizes and values the power of poetry to help us re-imagine our perceptions, ideas, and possibilities for the world.
To learn more about BEIT and submit poetry please visit here.
Mama tells me people are asking:
For how long will the trees continue to be watered?
One lesson after death teaches
questions you inherit as part of inheritance.
Mourning periods are for those who remain,
not what remains,
not for the home, nor for the land.
There is no scripture on grieving the home, the land left behind,
just one person less leaving their footmarks in the soil,
and us to mourn their absence.
What’s the alternative? I ask.
I cannot accept the alternative,
which is to say
the fruits are no longer,
and that’s to say
no life,
and that’s to say
no harvest.
The alternative is the ultimate death after death.
Mama, I want to say,
How does one go from accepting Siti’s invitation to
Come, let’s go water the trees to
wondering when the water will be cut off?
As if there are no attempts to burn
our livelihoods
whilst trying to
claim our lives.
Did they forget that in the woman
holding on to an olive tree
there are women who
harvested it,
which is to say
gave life to it?
In ghorbah, I learned you can learn
something new
about something you thought
you outgrew.
In ghorbah, an unexpected man
asks me to
marvel with him
at how olive trees grow in three generations!
I wonder if he’s ever sat in the shadow of one,
or if he wants to.
Mama, I want to say, how can we stop
watering something that took three generations to arrive?
I carry these generations through my senses.
In a photo,
Siti next to Sidi,
A frame of blooming roses around them.
In music,
Siti next to Sidi singing
Mawtini at a graduation ceremony.
They made love look so easy.
Mama, a friend tells me
she feels like we’re losing a generation.
three generations ago,
Sidi was born between
mawsam el-teen wa el-zaytoon.
Imagine the olive tree planted
at his birth,
what it was witness to,
the stories collected
during harvest
ever since.
Mama, the farmer will never know
if the tree grew or not, if it was harvested or not,
but the alternative is losing
what was
three generations in the making.
We plant for the future because we,
you and I,
are the future they thought wouldn’t be.
Mama, when they ask
For how long will the trees continue to be watered?
Tell them: until the future is guaranteed.
