Hind Shoufani
On the Laws of Fire
This could go on all night
The newscaster says
Its thirty years too late I think
But early enough still for our children to love
Push push push the limits of your breath
Push those police cars into the Nile, a river that has seen seven thousand years
Of history we can escape
Of a future we can plant in flesh
Push push push
Shove the integrity rising in your throats down the grey hole of their soul
Let them know
The farmer knows
The merchant knows
The children now know
The women have dropped veils and danced in fires
Built on the barrenness of blinding snow
The doctors who will stitch wounds
The lawyers who will defend you
The musicians who pitch notes of anger in tunes loud and true
The writers who can eulogize that lack of inspiration
Take all this perspiration
Take all the thirty years of rancor
All this lack of admiration
Tell them we won’t be held down by gunfire
Tell them your crops respond not to acid rain
Tell them we fear not uniforms and their Zionist refrain
Tell them we hear only the call of trees
And the wide horizons of the end of your pain
Tell them your mother fed you power
To never cower
To never beg and plead please
Tell them she fed you hearts and minds and souls that they cannot constrain.
Today Suez tells me fire departments are aflame
Today Cairo tells me inmates guard the police,
Today Alexandria rises, pointing a fist in righteous blame,
Today Egypt tells me the Christians kept watch while the Muslims prayed
Today my hands have told me of weariness removed
Of apathy betrayed
Singing tears down my cheeks have spoken of fresh water rain
Today the persistent defiance in my aging father’s voice
has sprung life forth again
A moment he waited for
Thirty years and a day
Thirty years and a night
Everything lost, and now everything to gain,
Push push push
Burn their cars into the sea
Tell them we won’t be left be to eat your leftovers
Tell them our feet can dance free
I can eat fruit again
I can make love and spread limbs open, I can allow me to be me
I do not pray
I do not kneel
I do not believe in your books
Or in your rules
That do not help women, that do not heal
I do not subscribe to the empty words that you preach
I do not believe the oppression you teach
But I,
I who does not believe,
I embrace your forms bundled on cement streets untamed
I embrace the lines of your men facing bullets that kill and maim
Backs bent yet voices loud, backs bent yet fists pounding proud,
They pray they pray they pray
And my lungs collapse into a burst of sunlit cloud,
Into a blossomed flower,
Devoid of fear
Devoid of complacency
Devoid of shame.
Push push push
For all your women who were raped
For all the children born out of violence and hate
For all the men jailed and sodomized and had their genitals burnt by an unwritten fate
Torturers looking for the simplest of
Information for the ever hungry CIA
Tell them we will burn the wood of sticks that bloodied vaginas
Tell them we will melt knives that have chopped flesh in secret dungeons
Tell them no matter how long the screaming continues,
One day silence will replace the cries of those you deemed
Criminal, you deemed unworthy, you deemed insane.
Tell them Israel will not win this
Tell them the USA will not win this
Tell them the people are always stronger than all your metal instruments
Of blood and electricity and waterboarding and the slaps, the kicks,
The beatings of dozens of years, push push push,
Tell them our daughters will write poems and be safe,
Tell them our atheists will blog and never ever have to explain,
Tell them we will love
And we will fuck
And we will sing the songs of pyramids rising to the sun, ablaze
Unafraid
Unconstrained.
Note if you will clinton’s pinched face
Note if you will the irony of burnt cars being pushed by calloused hands as
She encourages them to maintain calm
And refrain
Who the fuck are you kidding maam
Who the fuck do you think youre addressing maam
80 million people will not be fucked, again and again.
I never thought I would see this
This young blossom pushes through tyranny
Pushes through soil darkened by misogyny
Rises through wind howling in whirls of nepotism, of grand theft and larceny,
Unfurls leaves of steel in your garden of genocide,
Sprawls like weeds in your castles of finery,
And decadence and gluttony,
This young blossom is a machine gun,
A poisoned arrow,
A slingshot rock,
A poem,
A smile to stop your hegemony,
Fuck you, and your western so called democracy, ill have me a revolution,
I’ll have me a revolution please,
I’ll have me a revolution until the names of these doomed leaders,
Are buried in blood
Are buried in their misguided unity
Are buried in shrouds of suffering
I’ll have me revolution till their names
Are the lexicon of this history’s profanity.