“The task of theology lies in circumscribing the edges of symbolism and making an enclosure of it.” —Khatibi & Sijelmass, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy (1994)
"When God pours out rain and the earth floods
When God pours out rain and the earth floods for the sake of a flower, it is a love that no one knows. Afterward:
cities, like women, commit the names of those who raped them to memory. I glimpse a light and a thundering sky, I ready myself for a photo op and questions. I know God is omniscient. Why won't Gaza remarry like her sisters, Jerusalem, Jericho, Jenin?
Gaza dwells beside Hebron, so why so distant, sad, alone in the desert, standing before the sea? What's the difference between you and her? We're both gasping. You, into a reed flute, she into what she's lost.
The cypress is an old woman dancing at her great-grandson's wedding. The palm tree is a girl waving where are you headed to in Ramallah? My home's an orange tree that guards the path through the bare woods. The dusk, a mountain range braiding its slope.
Cities paint the air the color of clay. Gaza must stay up late with her killers and placate the victims. Her forehead's green where she's emblazoned God's name, where she's tried to escape from a masquerade.
I ask my body's first part, how it was figured. I have ten mothers. I was born an orphan to the soul of a woman. She refrained from desire, she married a barren land.
Who molded you into the almond, transmitted seed toward the blossom? A bunch hanging in the grapevine-sky, a butterfly losing its way in the garden,
and so you came into being, your first name dragged its two letters into the world—
Now I dwell in a land once untouched by misfortune, a land whose alleys I know by the cactus, by the lemon tree, by the tribes who hosted us in their pastures on our first migration, so we would guard their fear, and our women dwelt in their mills.
Who killed the dead sea? Who stole blue from salt? We have nowhere to be but here so the fields turn green. Father,
our migration is harrowing, camels cross the river, bullets pass overhead.
And he says Life is minutes and seconds. The shivering of water quenches. It is sufficient."
—Khaled Shaheen in You Must Live
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