Mohammed El-Kurd, from Rifqa; “This Is Why We Dance”
[Text ID: “This is why we dance: / If I speak, I’m dangerous. / You open your mouth, / raise your eyebrows. / You point your fingers. / This is why we dance: / We have wounded feet but the rhythm remains, / no matter the adjectives on my shoulders. / This is why we dance: / Because screaming isn’t free. / Please tell me: / Why is anger-even anger-a luxury to me?”]
Mohammed El-Kurd, from Rifqa; “Bulldozers Undoing God”
[Text ID: “In Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave. / This was only love: / her skeleton is that of the tree’s, / roots stitched into land into identity.”]
“When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;
And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.”
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