Black inkblot Poetry Daily logo
George Abraham

In the image — any image — the Palestinian is dead. In the background, a field of rocks that once were homes, field of fallen flowers. Beyond the image, the Palestinian dies. And elsewhere, dies again. The Palestinian is witnessed dead. That witnessing, a kind of death. Of someone's child, of someone's sibling, of someone's someone. The ownership of the Palestinian body, and after-image of, as another kind of death. The circulation of the image as anti anti/ownership. Ours, in some disembodied landsense which, presuming we are living, can't be ours. The ours implicated as a kind of death. The anti/ownership constituted by our living as another death. The circulation of the image as a motion with a void at its center, beating. Void which says look into me, and festers in the un-looking. Void which is opposite of image, after of sounds's after. Not dis/embodied but the / between. The Palestinian dies in, and against, the image, any image. The Palestinian dies in the image, stone in hand. The Palestinian dies in the image, roof ablaze. The Palestinian dies in the landscape's impossible green. The Palestinian dies in, and as, rubble. In the image, a politics of verticality. Beneath settler's acid. Beneath settler's rain. Any image. The Palestinian dies on screen. The smartphone powered by dying acid. In the background of an image, a teenager, 3-lettered badge on their chest, machine gun pitched towards god, smiles into the sun, setting over the horizon of a Palestinian corpse. In the image, a reddening sea. The american, believing we are all fragments of fragments of the same dismembered starlight, rubs their face with our dead & oceanic, to perform an image they name Birthright. A european digs and. A country. The west shares the image. After which, there is no after. It is 2022. Westward, the image is shared. The image, mistaken for an imperial siege on Ukraine, draws outrage beyond nation. The image is a Palestinian image, clarifies the Associated Press. The image dies again in dis-recognition. The living Palestinians die in the anti-mirror of the image's rot cycle. The Palestinians die in their living. The failure of these visual archives as a kind of death. Eye of camera, I of state. Death by which the west sanitizes our deaths with their empathy. Digestible until desensitized. Owned, dis-imagined, eventually. The border becween I and arch(i)ve as a line drawn in terror. The void at the center of the image's circulation, calling my every name. To stand at the event horizon of terror itself, and say my gazing, because of my living, is not enough. To call it razing. To move beyond w(h)it(e)ness of space itself, so that we may search for the return of our selves amidst the chaos of fallen stars. To name my spiraling origin an america of. To know what I'm searching for will require, of my body, of the many selves beyond it, an unknowable number of uncountable deaths.

from the journal POETRY LONDON
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
I wrote this poem in the midst of yet another summer of grief, noticing how cycles of Israeli war crimes, within our ongoing ethnic cleansing, constituted not only a material death of Palestinians, but an immaterial hyper-circulation and dis-articulation of the Palestinian body via the image. In the week since this poem's acceptance, Israeli Occupation Forces launched a siege of Jenin, the largest attack on a Palestinian city since 2002. The hands of the apartheid state, and of western institutions of media and language, are stained with the same blood: our own. Where is our future in any of this?

George Abraham on "Field Notes on Terror & Beginning"
Color photograph of Aracelis Girmay sitting on a rock in woodland
An Interview with Aracelis Girmay

“As someone who grew up far and a bit severed from so much of my extended family, I’ve always longed for the knowledges, practices, and histories that I might have known. I felt that the more I knew, the better I might understand or learn to read the systems and behaviors of my people….but also get closer, in diaspora, to the places from where my people came, and that all this knowing might help me to live somehow.“

via PEN AMERICA
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of the translation of Rene Char's The Brittle Age and Returning Upland
What Sparks Poetry:
Jody Gladding on René Char's The Brittle Age and Returning Upland 


"There are other more comprehensive volumes of Char’s work in translation....But this one offers a wonderful bookness. There’s an integrity to the object, the physical form with the page as its basic unit, the short poems set in that space, nothing to distract me as I turn the page, or don’t. It fits in the hand, rests on a shelf, travels in a pack."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency