Featured Poets: Amira El-Zein and Yahya Ashour

Amira El-Zein

Before God created humans, she gave life to the Jinn—spirits born of smokeless fire who inhabit an invisible world coexisting alongside ours. According to the Quran, they have their own societies, cultures, and religions. Like humans, they can be good or evil. They have an advantage over us in that they can see and interact with us—they can appear in human or in animal form. We, alas, do not enjoy reciprocal powers and so can’t know for sure when something happens through their agency—for good, or for ill.

I mention all this because poet, scholar, and Georgetown professor, Amira El-Zein has spent quality time with the Jinn. She’s reported on them in several books, including in a volume of poetry which was among the very first books Arrowsmith published (The Jinn, 2007), as well as in a more recent scholarly volume.

I don’t know what role they may have played in the creation of this current selection of poems, which carry readers to the very outer limits of the sayable. The three poems here are the songs and laments of long-suffering exile and displacement, charged with a will toward restoration. In A Passage to Eternity we hear a voice that’s at times haunted, horrified, vatic, and above it all. Without identifying itself with any specific history or geography, it speaks of loss and injustice: They slaughtered / the cattle / in the market // They burned the elders / in their beds.

In The Jars We Left Behind, we witness the persistence of memory: Friendly shadows, / we beg you, water / the graves of our dead / for them to rise / at our return. To our surprise, after much vacillation and doubt, the memory keeper ends on a hopeful note: Is it the end of our journey? / For our feet recognize / the road back/to our land, / and our lungs / inhale again / the mist of our mountains.

— Askold Melnyczuk

A Passage to Eternity

1
No sleep
No wake-up
No life
No death.

The winds howl,
terrified;
and the birds fly
to the end of the earth.
They heard and saw;
we did not.

The children huddle together
like seeds inside the fruit.

They closed the gate of Hell.

The children chant together
and bleed.
No north
No south
No east
No west

Is the fire a tree?
Is the tree a dagger?
Ants run into ants.

2
Why did they throw the keys into the river?
Why did they trap the shadows of dusk?
Why did they paint the sun
with your paleness,
O Death?
Why did they sink the corpses with stones?
Why did they revive the ancient plague,
and hunted the grief
in the wailing mothers’ throats?

Children’s eyes are stars
in the sky of the beyond.
Clothes, walls, windows, streets,
stones, and sand
called for help!

No sleep
No wake-up
No life
No death.

Moon and stars plunged down.
Date palms commit suicide
on your shores,
immolated land!

A tree alone is still alive.
The tree is in pain.
Its tormented branches sway
right and left
to uproot itself,
to be the shroud
covering with its branches
the small dead bodies.

3
Throats scream with the rage of the sea.
Is it dismay?
Is it death’s rattle?
Is it folly?
Is it betrayal?

Ants came to pray in rows
behind elder ants.

Sunflowers surrendered
to darkness!

Listen to the birds,
their wings flap
incessantly.

No sleep
No wake-up
No life
No death.

They slaughtered
the cattle
in the market.

They burned the elders
in their beds.

They recited
the verses of evil
day and night.

They trampled
the fresh corpses
with their boots.

They ripped down
the history books,
that the wind scattered
across the land.

In time
the martyrs will return
to rewrite the stories in the lost books,
and cross over
to eternity.

4
The agitated bats fly
off from the wells
they poisoned,
their shrieks piercing
the appalled night.

Who heard the agonizing
calls for help
from under the rubble;
weak, soft whispers,
between the present instant
and the beyond?

I hear someone weeping.
Is it Leila, the little girl,
the only survivor of her family?
Is it Fatima, the elderly woman
whose hands the dogs ate?
Or is it the ferocious wind
denouncing
those who saw,
and heard,
But did you not witness?

The Jars We Left Behind

1
The night is quivering
and the horizon bleeding.

Are we the water in the river
flowing to no sea?

Are we birds
eating scraps of food?

We are the sleepwalking tribe.

Screams is our language,
and gesticulations are
our children’s walk.

Our destiny changes places,
coins passing from
one hand to the other.

And, our history is hanged
on the clothesline.

The soldiers of hell
advance on four,
wagging their tails.

Salty is the air
and our eyes bleed dust.

2
“Friendly shadows,
we beg you to
sleep in our beds
to keep them warm!
And, with the colors of memories,
paint the walls
lest the house
forget us.

Friendly shadows,
do you hear
the water seeping
from the jars
we left behind?

Do you see beings shaped by dust
emerge from our abandoned houses?”

3
“Keep walking,”
screams our guide!

Off we plod, stamping the ground,
our children’s swollen bellies
are bells without sounds.

Their steps are heavy with darkness,
for their words have fallen
in Destiny’s Well.

They whirl
till they faint
and forget their hunger
of long ago.

Do we stumble on dead bodies?
Or is it the windy storm upon us?

“Keep walking,” screams our guide.

Do the jinn
clad in birds’ feathers
know how far we are
from the council of souls?

They spin around us
until night becomes fluid
and we drink it.

They enter our march,
tripping over children,
and stuttering words

interrupted
by the string of beads
that a goddess spins.

“Friendly shadows,
we beg you, water
the graves of our dead
for them to rise
at our return.”

4
Blind ants guide us on the road;
they serve us food
which has the dusk’s hue,
while the women trail
along the caravan
in tottering shapes.

Playing with the snow,
the spirits of the past reshape
the country of exile,
while vixens
leave the frozen lakes of silence
to join our march.

5
Guided by the master jinni,
we walk toward the lake
of immortal fishes.

We know the time of our arrival,
for we found the keys to our distant history,
when we will wake up slowly to the light
like seeds coming up from darkness.

The memory keeper

Away from home,
our days lie dead
in the streets of Beirut.

Away from home,
we go with the wind,
we go with the rain.

“Souls long gone,
do you see us from
your high balconies,
shuffling our feet,
tatters-barely covering
our skinny bodies?”

Faded paintings
on the walls of the cave
are our past lives

Our present is consumed
in the fire burning our land.

Are we bottles
that wobble
on an unsteady table?

Are we shadows
leaping to the other side,
passing through doors
that have lost their houses?

Are we eternally walking
in the procession of afflicted souls

Spirits gallop.
on the pages
of our old manuscripts.

And the drops of rain
are instants washed away
from the register.

Our fate
tumbles in the void.
It intermingles with
the laments of our orange trees
whom the occupiers
cut down.

In our dreams, we see
our women wailing
when the soldiers of evil
seize their homes,
while our elders
beat their chests,
like their dusty rugs.

Whispers traverse the caravan.
Is it our grandchildren
coming from the distant future
to join our displacement?

Are we the sleepless owls
staring into the void?
Nothing echoes our wings
when they flutter.

Are we the confined souls
in these small rooms
waiting for eyes
to see us
through the peephole?

Are we the depths of a well
awaiting an earthquake
to convulse its water?

Are we pebbles in the river
obedient to the waters of time?

Are we sea waves
colliding with life
as we hit the rocks?

Is it our memory,
that smoke we see from afar,
rising above
the ancient chimneys?

Is echo the keeper of memory?

*

Our bodies are in tumult.
The words we write stutter,
and the space between them
leads to our distant pine trees.

Do we hear
the beings of light
telling our children
tales without letters?
Or is it the train whistling
without sound,
when we sing
the song of hope?

Is it the end of our journey?
For our feet recognize
the road back
to our land,
and our lungs
inhale again
the mist of our mountains.

Yahya Ashour

I first encountered Yahya Ashour’s poetry when compiling You Must Live, an anthology of recent Palestinian poetry for Copper Canyon Press, in collaboration with Tayseer Abu Odeh. We had resolved to include only poets currently living in Gaza and the West Bank—but we made a single exception for Ashour. Born and raised in Gaza City, he was granted permission to travel to the U.S. in September 2023 for the Palestine Writes Festival in Philadelphia with a tour of readings across the country, culminating in a final event at a church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was there that Ashour found himself—suddenly and indefinitely—exiled. What you have witnessed with horror on your newsfeeds, Ashour has also had to watch from a distance, but it is his neighborhoods, his home, his family, his friends. I know writers who lost the will to write, even with no personal ties to Palestine—except those invisible connections: geopolitical complicity, the unbearable clarity of witnessing. For a time, Ashour went mute. He could not speak. So, he communicated instead by handwritten notes. Notes became poems.

I am struck by the deceptive clarity of Ashour’s poetry—a vulnerability so direct, so unguarded, it feels as though the poems themselves stand trembling on Gaza’s beach, where many are set. They seem to manifest fully formed, yet Ashour controls their subtlest ambiguities. Consider the first poem: its opening lines read as both a prayer and a lament, in which God might be included among those abandoned—alongside his family, his people, now “sleeping in tents.” Or that deft shift in the second poem in which the reader is unsure whether the speaker longs to wear his body of writing imagined as garments or the bodies of strangers. Given this fine balance between innocence and gravity, between transparency and moral weight, I was not surprised to learn that Ashour had previously written children’s books. His poems carry that plainspoken profundity found in a child’s impossible questions, which can shake the adult’s whole world: How old is the darkness? or Why, if those people are hungry, don’t you just feed them? Each poem implicates the reader thus, placing them in the position of their own silence on this side of the page, and demands that they break it.

What the World’s Silence Says is the title of Ashour’s recent reading tour, which has taken him to over 55 universities and cultural institutions across the United States. He now teaches as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Poetry at Pitzer College. His poems have appeared in Mizna, ArabLit Quarterly, Iowa Literaria, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other journals. His e-book, A Gaza of Siege & Genocide, is available for purchase, and his manuscript-in-progress, Gazing, is forthcoming. I’ve just had the privilege of reading it in full. The poems presented here are drawn from that manuscript.

— Sherah Bloor

Softer Than Prayers

God, my family, and my people
sleep in tents
softer than clouds,
softer than prayers.
Their chests open to shells,
their food is anguish.

Tell us,
how to endure a massacre each day?

How to carry on our backs
this mourning.
There’s no
space for graves between the tents.

What remains of the ages.
We outlive our own buildings—
rubble dyed with blood
and ashes covering limbs.

Thirst for Stains

These are my poems
stained with oil.

I should’ve kept them
to myself but here I am
washing them out, hanging them
over the clothesline,
trusting the winds, my friends,
and strangers I long to wear
their bodies.

*

Would any of you please
turn off this faucet for me?
Thirst has bound my hands.

I’d rather savor the words
I poured out already
before their fruits—
still hanging on
severed branches—
begin to rot.

Running Away from Survival

I sit with my family
in a blurry video call
in a place they fled to,
leaving our home lonely, destroyed.
We avoid talking about places,

exchange jokes and analyses instead.
I ask them: “How is everyone doing?”
They answer: “How are you doing?” They ask me:
“How are you doing?” I answer:
“How is everyone doing?”

Then silence conquers
until innocence divides:
“I miss you, my uncle,” says a nephew.
“We miss you, uncle,” says a niece.
“Are you staying at our house?”
“Why don’t you come to stay with us?”

How do I tell them our home
has become rubble.
My body is filled with it.
I can’t talk or walk ever since.

I’m always the one who ends
the call, so I can return to my nightmares—
where I feel truly with them,
running from my survival.

I find peace
living the war in my nightmares.
In every nightmare,
a house

Selfies

When I realized I was standing
in front of a mirror, I cried,
as if I were half of the world,
and the other half was watching.

A Gazan Body-Memory

Washing my own heart
with my own blood,
no one else would do it for me.

Finally, I found the meaning of life
and I’m living it to the fullest.
My name means to live.
But will I? Must I?
I’m throwing sticks at myself
I ran out of stones.

They must’ve dism ember ed
my b o d y last night,
I must dism ember
my m e m o r y every morning.

Free souls find their way out
of bodies, but never
my memories.

Jesus forgot to save me,
you cannot dism ember ashes.
Drink my dust on the beach.

Or draw me
with my own blood
into myself.
I will go to sleep now,
my eyes resting on the pillow
next to me,
for at least 75 eternities.