Why? – A Poem

(To the old woman in Jerusalem, who lost everything.) By George Polley   Why did these men in black steal my house with all my things in it, saying my house is theirs, that it […]

The Familiar Stranger – A Poem

By Aida Qasim It was neither an exceptional nor particularly mundane morning but I was not the same The bashful sun cautiously lifted the white shroud hovering above Ramallah’s towering skyline Memories nurtured and cajoled […]

Stolen Joys – A Poem

By Nour El-Borno – Gaza   Moons shine through her eyes As she walks past her house: Here, she once laughed; There, she once cried.   “I remember,” she whispers.   The dark hours that […]

Dima’s Eyes – A Poem

By Aida Qasim Eyes like an unfinished poem possess my spirit They rise the moon out of its slothiness Shaking away the stillness of my pillow I shudder and solicit a memory: Sweet mint tea […]

In Jerusalem – Poems

By Rachel Astarte In Jerusalem There is a quiet I am looking for from bulldozers from blastings from smoldering anger There is a place I have never seen although I have imagined it during childhood […]

Ode to Lifta – A Poem

By Aida Qasim Even Neruda’s birds that once roamed from sea to sea have flown to other continents The stones I once rested against during the olive harvest seem to sit by indifferently as another kingdom […]

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Reflections on Palestine – A Poem

By Stephen Brackens-Brinkley & Dorothy Dot Milnes-Simm Beautiful the olive trees that grew in Palestine, and beautiful the buildings rising up through branches fine. Wonderful the people that were thrown into a cell Israel’s the […]

FA LES TEEN – A Poem

By Uzma Falak My grandmother wove dreams on her spinning wheel, invoked you in her songs. I memorized the rhyme. My mother treasured your olives— a keepsake of the Blessed Land, a relic I never touched. […]

Summer in Gaza – A Poem

By Uzma Falak We are left to count again massacres, dead eyes harboring a dream, burnt throats on the brink of a an anthem charred olives, faithful lips and fingers— maimed. Seraj- 8, Bassim-10, Moussa-16, […]

Variations – A Poem

By Ramona Wadi reciting the vacillations of exile in decades marked by the erosion of twilight a sonorous punctuation of language lacerated by fire and bludgeoning touching nothing but memory an insatiable horizon, mingling with […]

When Kathy Kelly Went to Jail

By Gary Corseri [Kathy Kelly is the co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She has traveled to Iraq and Gaza during wartime–to bear witness and give comfort. The author of “Other Lands Have Dreams,” she […]