The Artist From The Inside Out

Tag: #Palestinianamerican

  • TO ALL THE TETAH’S #poetry by jay

    TO ALL THE TETAH’S #poetry by jay

    Two poems today about my Tetah in honor of all Palestinian Tetah’s/grandmother’s – Keep the humanity alive. Never lose the ability to see the people in the face of the atrocities.

    Tetah and Cede circa. 1937
    TO ALL THE TETAH'S


A Tetah is the pinnacle that reaches to the outskirts of the universe. An apex of love that is the highest order of being. When I see you in my dreams/ reaching toward me with open arms/ comforting me like the skin of my soft puppy playing against my heartbeat. This is chivalry/ this is King/ this is Queen of destiny. The beauty/ the  colors/ a kaleidoscope/ a spectrum of lights fill the sky with spirit/ full-force and bright. I hold treasures in my heart/ my chest beats upon sheer memory.


Warm fragile light recedes into the dark night/  palatable/ my tongue dancing with the delight in reaching toward the taste of this love. Your life—shadow/ distant yet burning. I struggle to materialize your spirit/ return it to me now!


Angel eyes upon the ground/ your garden of loofah/ koosa/ eggplant/ hung heavy on vines like black-purple-gem-hearts/ full round and pressed to earth. Clinging from tree’s— the fig/ the peach and the herbs of life—your life/ entangled in my veins like weeds overgrown this is you.


I recall vast lifetimes/ tracing a labyrinth to all the Tetah’s that have nurtured/ fed their grandchildren lovingly. A silent steady stream. A monumental mountain/ heavy on the landscape. This I see in a glimpse/ a sudden weighted gravity/ that pierces my heart/ as I sit in quiet memory of you my Tateh.


Huge you were to my child eyes/ little you became as I grew with the grapevines. Small in frame/ yet huge in spirit/ you grew with each passing moment. Now—you are a giant in the Universe. I see the magnitude of you in the bright stars/ you in the heavens/ you loom large as the ink-black night and burn forever long as the day's light!


All of this in a glimpse of you.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


HERE I STAND ON TORRID LAND


here i stand on torrid land

my spirit wandering the dusty sand

of fig trees, khubz and floured hands

i stand just

foot driven deep

in earth’s crust

sure-footed grip of rocks and mortar

my soul ripped in two

by grief’s torture

small hands grasped lightly

by the remembrance of her

soft dough-baked grip of salt, of land

ancient yet present her cherub eyes danced

table-side love, she spoon-fed her clan

with grape leaves and olives

and not so dainty meat pastries

prepared from the vines, toiled by cede’s hand

his backyard bounty, his dreams -- their dreams

of their homeland and my dreams of

hot cement days and barefooted children

pretending the dawali are stacks of cigars

stuffed and rolled, stacked high on big plates

the dawali grew higher

creating bigger heaps

of make-believe

fun time with cousins

longing for the smells of dusty left behind relics

that bespeak of them, their belongings

the hookah, the 8 track tapes, belting out loud arabic music

the robe and keffiyeh my grandfather wore not so long ago

in ramallah, the curious one that later became a halloween costume

worn by my childhood friend

and that old oriental rug beaten by history

splayed across the living-room floor, adding an air of the exotic

to their mundane colonial suburban sofa

the lamb and garlic stained air, smelt early at daybreak

always there, lingering about

oiled-hot-pots full, brimming with tomato broth baths

and grown ups lamenting the evening news, the war, the fight

for the return of their land, usurped by foreign man

those that had suffered atrocities of their own

have turned ugly, heaping nails, spitting bulldozers

claiming god has promised this to them

easily they slipped between tongues

english and arabic at once

they were here/there simultaneously

they had created a new language, one easily understood by us

and me, absorbing all this with my round brown eyes

unaware of my future task

silently inhaling the smoke of my

family’s lingering rage, the kind of rage

that clings to the walls, to the curtains, to the furniture, to me

to my stuffed pink panther

the one i loved so much for its unique shape and color

the color of bubble gum and pink lemonade -- but the rage!  

the rage had to be scrubbed off the walls, scrubbed off the furniture

scrubbed off my clothes, scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed!

 and i

inherited this task unknowingly.



©Jay Mora-Shihadeh

    Free Palestine!

  • Naomi Shihab Nye #Poetry

    Naomi Shihab Nye #Poetry

      Two great Poems today- With a Highlight on Palestinian American Poet, Naomi Shihab Nye

      I periodically turn to poets from my heritage and am always reminded and delighted by the deep roots we have as Palestinian’s in the art forms of Spoken Word, Storytelling and Poetry.

      Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Nye is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate. ( poetryfoundation.org )

      Blood

      BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

      “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
      my father would say. And he’d prove it,
      cupping the buzzer instantly
      while the host with the swatter stared.

      In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
      True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
      I changed these to fit the occasion.

      Years before, a girl knocked,
      wanted to see the Arab.
      I said we didn’t have one.
      After that, my father told me who he was,
      “Shihab”—“shooting star”—
      a good name, borrowed from the sky.
      Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
      He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

      Today the headlines clot in my blood.
      A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
      Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
      is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
      I wave the flag of stone and seed,
      table mat stitched in blue.

      I call my father, we talk around the news.
      It is too much for him,
      neither of his two languages can reach it.
      I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
      to plead with the air:
      Who calls anyone civilized?
      Where can the crying heart graze?
      What does a true Arab do now?

      Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)

      A Palestinian Might Say

      BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

      What?
      You don’t feel at home in your country,
      almost overnight?
      All the simple things
      you cared about,
      maybe took for granted. . .
      you feel
      insulted, invisible?
      Almost as if you’re not there?
      But you’re there.
      Where before you mingled freely. . .
      appreciated people who weren’t
      just like you. . .
      divisions grow stronger.
      That’s what “chosen” and “unchosen” will do.
      (Just keep your eyes on your houses and gardens.
      Keep your eyes on that tree in bloom.)
      Yes, a wall. Ours came later but. . .
      who talks about how sad the land looks,
      marked by a massive wall?
      That’s not a normal shadow.
      It’s something else looming over your lives.

      Naomi  Shihab Nye, “A Palestinian Might Say” from The Tiny Journalist.  Copyright © 2019 by Naomi  Shihab Nye.  Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., http://www.boaeditions.org.

      Photo Credit: Wikipedia