Uprooted Olive (for Emad Burnat)
the margin is not the margin
to the margin / the central drone
trails a sound like a lawnmower
mowing down the sky / you look up
the legal precedence for seizure
stand with fellahin & land
in prison / in the margin to turn
is to turn inside / out
beyond the din of congratulation
your every move a body's scrawl
across the white lawn of law
the wall of muteness / if departure
then turn to depths / roots
like fingers / claim horizon
The Politics of Translation
when Naji was sentenced & buried
in parentheses / when she saw her house
slowly becoming debris / Naji’s old mother
went into a comma / she was driven
by ambulance / dashes to ashes /
pupils to colons / the new revised standard
replacing the old revised standard
replacing the King’s version & so on
outside the house not-yet not-house
a nightingale offered quotation marks
around the bulldozer’s boring
exclamations of / instant ancient ruins
footnote to a lengthy dissertation
on subject-object relations
Ismail and Abla Khatib, Who Donated their Murdered Son’s Organs to the Enemy
your body full / of fragments / hallowed be thy brain
spilled over your clothes / you / already not
of this world / in the shadow of our difficult / we plant
your heart inside / a teenaged girl you will
never touch / liver we bury / in a baby you will
never raise / elderly you’ll never be / kidneys
we resettle in alien skin / your lungs now breathe
for two who could not breathe without you
we know your toy gun looked / death
in the eye but why / did they have to shoot you
twice / & now inside “the enemy” you rise
behind the lines of inside / you live
& see for yourself what none of us can see
ourselves / ourselves from the outside
Philip Metres is the author of Sand Opera (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), and To See the Earth (2008), etc. A two-time recipient of the NEA and the Arab American Book Award, he is professor of English at John Carroll University.