February 20, 2024

1 Poem: 10 November 2023

by Mira Mattar

Today, I am grateful to be publishing the work of Mira Mattar, an incredible Palestinian poet based in the UK whom all of us need to be reading and uplifting. Mira and I had the privilege of connecting as Noor Hindi and I edited our global Palestinian poetry anthology for Haymarket Books these past few years. I cannot help but see Mira Mattar’s work in a constellation with Palestinians such as Fargo Tbakhi and Zaina Alsous in the US scene, given the depth of her poetry’s political thinking and lyric introspection. Her chapbook Affiliation is among one of my favorite recent poetry collections. Centered around a long-form poem dedicated to the speaker’s father, this chapbook rigorously questions the affiliations with which we structure our world: the blindspots which themselves slaughter what “‘together’ means and why / and where it begins / and that it ends.” It is a rare joy to read a poem that’s pedal-to-metal for twenty-three pages of unending poetry-meets-theory brilliance. The chapbook was recently relaunched by Sad Press and all profits from its sale will go to Palestine Action’s legal fund.

It is with this respect and gratitude that we publish Mattar today with a poem that speaks to our impossible time and makes art that our future selves will surely return to through the many impossibilities that will constitute our living hereafter.

—George Abraham, Mizna executive editor

every word in every language will sing their names

& the places their names grew out of

—Mira Mattar

10 November 2023

I’ll do to language what they did to my people

I’ll blow it apart & make it run

I’ll sear its rough & tender forms to burning

I’ll take each singing hollow 

  inside the As & Os that stretch the words

 out daily in elastic pleasure                 

                                                              bread

                                                              heat 

& make it hungry

I’ll make it starve

I’ll take the common waters of its lyric

   & parch them to arhythmic cries

 not even fleeing birds can mimic

I’ll bury it

I’ll coat it in the dust of its own life

I’ll take the pinky wands of its girlhood & douse 

  & electrify & plunder it to stupefaction

I’ll take its own name & push it so deep underground the whole earth rots

  & its final form is 10,000, 13,000, 14,000, 20,000 singing martyrs

I’ll pull its eyes from sleep & from every daily comfort 

   from the turn of the key in the lock at the end of the day

    from the easy glance at the man you love knowing soon you will eat & sleep 

I’ll take each quiet dawn 

  & fill it with torrents of empty words 

 & white faces 

  & dollar bills 

I’ll find every moment of pause at the end of each sentence 

   & I’ll hold its head in the gentle scoop of my forearms 

  & I’ll say, even though every single person you know on earth has just been murdered before your eyes you have to live on somehow in the same world that killed them

 I’ll take every groaning elder fretting at the beads 

 & the backgammon table 

  & I’ll fill the cells of their senses one by one with the orange blossoms of orgies 

                                                                                                                  of heavens on earth

I will scent every breath with sea salt 

  & honey 

  & the best cigarettes you’ve ever tasted

I will breathe with you while you are forced to dig your mother out from under tons of sheets of concrete until your nails are shorn off your fingertips & your fingertips are clawed off your fingers & with your own bones you yourself are digging for the bones of your lover under the house you built with your own hands over & over & over 

    your pointless crawling cockroach insomniac murdering heartless lifeless life 

 that lives on death 

  that breathes death 

  that makes death 

 that sells death 

   that mines death 

   that calculates death 

  that ejaculates death 

 that orgasms death 

   that tastes death 

  that smells death 

  that is death 

that thing 

 that order you call your own 

 that takes each pulse of ocean & makes of it money 

  that takes each flicker of moon & makes of it money 

 that takes each hounding unmanned gun moored on the watchman’s fence 

that rotates its nothing head, sees one of us & shoots

I’ll take each time you called us animals & fill 

    each lion’s mouth on earth & 

     each cow’s separate stomach & 

    each fly’s million eyes & 

       each slug’s glowing sex & 

     each fox’s slowly blinking amber eye at dusk & 

 fill them with the names of the dead & 

fill them with the names of the living & 

 every word in every language will sing their names 

& the places their names grew out of

  & the aching details of their bedroom dressing tables 

 & the exact shade of gray the walls turn as night falls

   & every single texture of every smooth & wrinkled brow—

& we animals 

& we sunbeams 

& we fine pointed bullets 

& we surgeons cleansing wounds with corner shop vinegar

& we babies born to no one born 

                                to nothing 

 will take our revenge on language

  & I will take your only question 

 & I will fill its twisted spinal cord with a century of litanies so precise that the forced confession bursts to millions of poisonous pieces each with millions of wavering fingers

      pointing at a sunless sky

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. Her novella, Yes, I Am A Destroyer, was published in 2020. Her chapbook, Affiliation, and her first collection, The Bow, were both published in 2021. A new chapbook, And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring, is just out from Veer2. She regularly reads her work in the UK and abroad. Mira lives and works in London.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.