October 7, 2025

The Stream Runs Through Me

by Omar Berrada

Poems in conversation with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abourahme

“Where there is violence, there is always a trace, an echo buried deep, deep down but calling still.” These poems aspire to the condition of echo. They respond to images from a work by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abourahme, titled May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth. In some of the images, people sing as they accomplish daily rituals of farming and togetherness. In other scenes, performers in an open landscape improvise reenactments of the same movements and sounds. Thistles grow where soil has been disturbed. While bearing witness to loss, the work is also a poetic gesture of repair: there are no settlers in sight.

Published as the final entry to Mizna’s The Memorial Folio, link to the full series HERE.

—Omar Berrada

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Red on red
The song is history
moving through the present.

—Omar Berrada

No Song

Red is the color
of my true loves’ wounds

I love the land
whereon they lie
whereon they learned
to hum low to leap
limbless to commune
in silence

In this land
they move shoulder first
through absence of light

There’s no hoping
for care
we have found
each other
we sustain volcanoes
erupting within

Red is the color
of my true loves’ dreams

I love the force
when they revive
& hum a lock
of hair away and say
these colors need a whisper

Some souls awaken
to no song

In this land
a thin stream
sighs without cease
as it dulls the valley’s rocks

There is endurance in landscape
can you hear a blur of voices
as you crouch in the flow
of limb and bone

In this land
a patch of red sways
to a cadence untold

There is patience in making
our way home

Find what will return
your soul to itself
and give your body
all of your body
to it

---

Parallel Time

Where might beauty rest
when land lies out of reach?

Between prison and its double
says the jailer between silence
and its shadow how many miles
in parallel time

Mumble
               mumble
                                     mumble
       S   H   O   U   T
     mumble        mumble
S   H   O   U   T
                                            mumble

Echo and repetition echo
and repeat each other tied
into tidy buns don’t walk
these streets roam the ruins in
stead dance to another’s time
b        r        e        a        t        h        e
inside a longer film a horizon
of harsh oranges a landscape
of deeper reds the large prison
is fading
                     amid settler lights—
      existence interrupted

Faint head motions
a jagged shoulder shake
stability is out
      of focus and still
dawn will break

---

Toward Patience

Black on green
her voice pierces the valley
        a cactus consolation
                a call to ancient stone
Chasing perennial ghosts
the singer walks toward patience

White on red
        a frenzy of forearms
battles the wind a dance
of scimitars ascends
into trance
                composes a mawwal
of self-harm

How far can you hear
as grass rustles under feet
How soon will you meet
an image of your future-past
when you know
                there is nothing
                                on the other side

Blue on green
                a part of you
motions outside
                        the frame of me
like a boxer who need not aim
like a lover who dare not see
in your measured moves
                grace is given
but what is there to mend?

Our path is long but a sound
never left us        a melody
of mourning a martyr’s lament
        break through
layers of buried time
rise over muffled horizons
white on blue
                aerial intimacies
with the departed

Yellow on green
wheat stalks will grow
taller                than fear
will cover ancient wounds
& with graceful dances
carry the ghosts
of our limbs

It was my voice the stream
runs through me soothes
the aching soil yet my neck
tilts with inscrutable intent
how melody turned into anger

Red on red
The song is history
moving through the present.

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Born and raised in Casablanca, Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of Clonal Hum, a chapbook of poems on the “tree-of-heaven” (Obultra, 2020), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (Kulte, 2016) and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (Litmus, 2024). His writing was featured in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Mizna, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature (UC Press, 2012) and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry (Texas UP, 2020). He currently lives in New York.