2k15.3

WATER // RAGHAD

in ,

Today, I am 70% made up of acid.

I wake up and the walls of my belly are caving in. Everything is rising up until my windpipe is a pond of burning matter. I rage over geographical borders. I will explain to you; not everything that’s said nowadays is hallow. I know, history used to draw us into a picture, and if we looked up, it’s holy. If we looked down, it’s holy. And if we hit shore, oh land, all your water was holy. And I’m looking for the point in time where we got banished outside of self-love, through narrow doors, shoulders caved in like shame.

So I look to the north of you, land, and I see a golden crown on fire. It was still holy. I look south of you, land, and I see genesis, I see heaven cultivated with blood. It was still holy. Today, I don’t believe in your borders, only your skies. Transcending beyond your pride, I know you used to offer love in abundance. Arabia-felix, you were beating with joy. But I rage dipping my feet in your Gulf of oil pipelines and green waters, your Red Sea about to burst at the seam like it did for the israelites.

Today today I’m tired tired of your repetition, land. 

When we broke the holiest of waters and screeched into being it was that same water that sustained you. Your motherhood was massacred when you failed our mothers. 
Now let us learn how to belong to all of you

DAY 1 // HAYAT

in ,

The history of letting go in order to get in books started with Moses, they don’t mention it, but if you set foot close to his grave you’ll see the crowds of all the words God couldn’t sing into his left ear which he cut off, you’ll see the other half of the truth that wasn’t handed to us. A man’s desire to stay a king, to stay in between the walls that held his mother’s perfume, and just as I am trying, to stay a storyteller.

Sometimes, we need to shed parts of us to stay faithful to the stories we’re telling, Van Gogh and Moses cut off their ears, the modern storyteller misses a step on the staircase, forgets how much sugar to take with their tea, not pack books when travelling, fall in love more often than they should or claim that they don’t believe in love in the first place, publicly, in our papers or in cafés where atmospheres and people with better stories than us come to get their coffee are sold. In the romantic era, John Keats decided to leave Fanny Brawne for his body to ache for her so that his poems would swell. Milena and Kafka never touched, and that turned him to an insect, something so ugly and gruesome that the norm of crushing a bug was created. 
 I stayed in bed for so long the other day staring at a wall the furniture pieces started making noises afraid that my silence will eat me up and turn me into a sibling of theirs, or that’s how heavy my heart felt anyway. I couldn’t reply to the messages confirming the ride to my mother, it’s been over a year since I last saw her but I tell the nightstand with a short hand that it’s because of all that I put into the paper the night before, the paint chips on my eyelids and I refuse to not write again. This is how far one would go. If you’re not a Majnun howling with the animals, if your pain isn’t as big as the world the words will come out dull, the vocabulary will be home-work good enough only.

O ALLAH // JUMANA ALJOHANI

in ,

O Allah, I seek refuge in you from being among the ignorant.
O Allah, this life is inclined to drag people into the gutter,
And I seem susceptible to falling.
I stumbled and stumbled and each stumble seems to weigh more than the former.
O Allah, I seek refuge in you from the evils of my feelings, my seeing, and my hearing.
Make the trivial and temproray matters in life seem as they really are.
If forbidden matters in life seemed artistic,
Make me appreciate Your presence and Your mercy instead.
If forbidden matters in life seemed aromatic,
Make them malodorous and remind me that Paradise is just divine in all its forms.
O Allah, Your mercy is beyond all the power of mankind,
Beyond the Earth, the seas, and all that is infinite.
When everything, O Lord, seems like a forlorn hope,
When I am at the edge of giving up,
Just remind me of the reason why I’m here in the first place.