our ruins, their songs
There is a poem written by the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail that has been following me around. I first read it in a workshop with the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama last year and it traveled all the way home with me, not leaving my head. It’s title, stark and descriptive, is: ‘This Poem Will Not Save You’. Mikhail lists, with empathy and clarity, all the ways in which her poem will fail to prevent tragedy, death and heartbreak. The phrase ‘I’m sorry’ is repeated three times in the poem’s fifty-three lines. The poem ends like this:
I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm,
and when we need to touch the soul
to know it’s not dead
their songs
give us that touch.
Take a moment. Read those lines out loud. Notice how the line breaks and commas urge you on at ‘us’, ‘times’ and ‘warm’ and how, in the lines that follow, you are made to pause at the words ‘soul’, ‘dead’, ‘songs’ and ‘touch’. I say all this to remind you that your own body is also part of the poem; that you have song in you, too. For the longest time in human history, poetry was only spoken, passed on through music and speech. Birds, signing for their own pleasure, gave us rhymes, gave us poems. To write a poem is to express gratitude for that ancient gift.
Whereas Mikhail addresses an unspecified ‘you’ for most of the poem, she switches to an ‘us’ and a ‘we’ in the final lines. Because I am in some ways quite a self-centered person, it took me a long time to see that Mikhail’s ‘we’ is not necessarily about me, at all. The language here takes you right into a war zone (‘their crossings over our ruins. / Their songs will not save us’) and I have never lived in one. I have never known that kind of despair, or known ruins like that.
Still, I do know loss and sorrow, on another scale, in other contexts. And I believe Mikhail is being generous by writing a poem for her people (or so I guess) and yet also offering it to a larger ‘we’, knowing that despair can take many forms, that all our lives are eventually touched by loss.
The genocide carried out against the Palestinian people in Gaza is in its third year. Although much has been written about the horrendous 7 October attacks by Hamas there is, still, next to no political support for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people being starved and killed at the hands of the State of Israel. And while the recent decision of the Israeli government to introduce a death penalty for Palestinians was widely condemned, it also, crucially, did not seem to have any consequences for Israeli leadership.
What is unfolding in Gaza is untouchable for me, in that I cannot imagine it. But I believe the people living through those horrors. I believe their voices must be heard, I believe their truth must be written and sung and shouted from the rooftops.
Coastal Lines Press is a publishing collective founded by people who are living and surviving in Gaza. The project was initiated last year by Palestinian writer, poet and translator Shahd Alnaami. Shahd hadn’t been writing before the genocide, but when she lost her closest friend Eman in Israel’s war on Gaza in December 2023, she began to express herself on the page. And soon, others joined her. You can buy Shahd’s writing, and that of many other Palestinians, in the form of digital zines (which you can then print yourself). Each zine you buy directly supports the artist who created it.
‘Hope, however fragile, is an act of resistance,’ Shahd writes. I believe reading and sharing her words is part of that resistance too.
There is a Full Moon in Libra on April 2. In that relationship-minded sign, Full Moons can sometimes be quite lovely, though I’m not expecting this one to be so smooth. The Sun and Moon are both in a square to Jupiter, loud, and demanding to be seen. Small adjustments will not do. But if it’s a shake-up you’re after, this Full Moon may just have it and put you back in touch with desires you have long neglected. Incidentally, this week is a great moment for reading poetry, too. It’s a moment to read a poem out loud and see how it lands in your body as well as your heart.
Sources and further reading:
‘My Poem Will Not Save You’ by Dunya Mikhail is part of the collection In Her Feminine Sign, 2019, New Directions Publishing Corp.