RED HAT
Watching the death of entire families,
barrels of explosives dropped on homes
four generations gone at once
twenty-year-old Didi Hyd said:
the hatred inside gets out of control . . .
Someone advised:
that is when you should transform it to courage. .
And I thought that Didi,
in spite of all of human hatred
deserves the beauty and freedom
of being only twenty:
she can take a pair of scissors and
cut the word hatred into two equal parts – hat and red,
leaving them separate like a ceasefire.
She can put the right piece on the left side.
That can give her an elegant red hat.
She can put a big flower on it,
a daisy may work, or a magnolia
blooming out of season,
and for a perfect reason:
good twenty-year-old magnetism.
She can go down an imaginary street for a walk
gathering admiration and
dropping petals that appear
like long tears.
She can walk
past seven O’clock,
past “hate” O’clock,
past nine and ten and past “ill-even”
and then past war’s midnight.
She can come home to the rising sun
and give the hat to it . . .
and all the hatred too . . .
The sun will then turn all into heat
and history that repeats itself
like a lover who can’t get enough
of saying: I love you.
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Palestinian Embroidery
Too many stitches…
I counted nineteen thousand
in the body of this Palestinian dress. .
My culture is wounded–
and the women in the villages and the cities
are stitching it with red yarn and yearning. .
Hovering over a tiny square, barely visible —
I am all women in all cultures. .
sewing eternal flowers on pockets and chests
and shoes and belts. .
Stitch after stitch symbolic as our lives,
insistent like the sun,
and returning like wars —
the sunshine of imagined happiness
threading our hope into necklaces of tears
and we go on working. .
Our fingerprints on everything — print after print,
before girls were ever allowed to go to schools
and have papers or books
printed with our names on them.
Our fingerprints are the early writings embroidered
with the embers of the desire to know –
Mother Eav eating from the tree of knowledge,
dusting off the innocence of the divine fruit
with her fingertips, owning it for eternity –
l-eav-ing fingerprints on it —
a map for all of us to madly seek knowledge.
Stitches,
I counted nineteen thousand in the body of this dress.
I want to know how long it takes a cloth
to heal from too many wounds
and stitches . .
Ibtisam Barakat ابتسام بركات is a Palestinian-American poet, artist, educator and author working in both English and Arabic. She was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Ramallah before immigrating to the United States of America. She is the author of eight books including Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine , Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood. Her books won the Arab-American Book Award; the International Reading Association's Book Award; the Middle East Book Award; the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Book Award, and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Her writings have been translated into more than thirty languages. Reviewers called Ibtisam Barakat's work: "ground-breaking"; "riveting"; "genius"; "eloquent"; "timely"; "beautiful" and "highly recommended." She taught Writing Ethics at Stephens College, was a delegate to the United Nations third conference on the elimination of racism, and was a two-time judge for the national finals of Poetry Out Loud. She started to write at a war shelter when she was three years old, and met Alef, the first letter of the Arabic language, and fell in love with words. She continues to write because threads of stories stitch together humanity’s wounds.” www.ibtisambarakat.com .